


help me show every single layer

by skatzaa



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, Found Family, My Love Letter To Natasha Romanoff, POV Natasha Romanov, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Red Room (Marvel), Sort Of, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Swearing, background clint barton/laura barton - Freeform, past Sharon Carter/Natasha Romanov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-05-25 04:03:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14968688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skatzaa/pseuds/skatzaa
Summary: Choice,Irina signs. She does it again, deliberately including the possessive pronoun this time.My choice.She understands. She made her choice—she’s not the thing the Red Room made her to be. Sheisn’t.*Or: Natasha has been her own person for a long time now. Some days, she's still a work in progress.





	help me show every single layer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChibiSquirt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChibiSquirt/gifts).
  * Inspired by [BroTP to OTP](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14973110) by [ChibiSquirt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChibiSquirt/pseuds/ChibiSquirt). 



> Based loosely on [this AU](http://ntalias.co.vu/post/135898959804/empressnacho-eryuko-spookymileskane-au).
> 
> Written for the 2018 Captain America Reverse Big Bang for art by the wonderful ChibiSquirt! Thank you for putting up with me when I decided to start over halfway through, and for cheering me on as I went This was so much fun to write and it turned into a bigger monster than I expected, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Special thanks goes to Syd, who betaed as much of this as she could before she left for vacation (any remaining mistakes, therefore, are mine, and I will try to come back and do a final edit soon).
> 
> ChibiSquirt's wonderful art can be found [here!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14973110) Please go shower them with love!!!
> 
> Title from Let it Be by my personal lord and savior, Hayley Kiyoko. I listened to Expectations on repeat while writing the majority of this fic.

 

Contrary to what most people believe—and what a few brave souls have dared to ask her about, over the years—Natasha’s tattoo is not a red hourglass.

“Well of course it isn’t,” Clint says when she cautiously brings it up, years after he made his own decision and changed her fate. He smiles at Nat and ruffles her short hair, the same way he’ll later do to his son, once Cooper has been born. “They’d have to be an absolute moron to think the whole of you can be summed up by what those bastards made you be.”

Nat grins and tucks her chin down to hide it.

The Red Room did make her be the Widow, long before she took their teachings and twisted them into something she could own, rather than be ashamed of. But the important thing is that she _has_ learned how to turn the Widow into someone that can help others, and do something good.

On her bad days, Natasha tries to remember how proud Clint had seemed in that moment, how fond he was. The way Laura had hugged her when Nat and Clint came back in from the barn, and tucked a piece of Nat’s hair behind her ear.

She remembers that she’s loved, for more than her training—that she _is_ more than her training.

It helps, most of the time.

On days when it doesn’t, she finds a secluded corner and allows herself a minute to stare at the tattoo on her ankle, the one she was born with. She doesn’t know why it’s only a single dandelion seed, curving itself under her right medial malleolus, but it makes her tentatively hopeful.

* * *

Officially, Natalia Alianovna Romanova was born in 1984, in a small town in Russia that no longer exists. A few years after her birth, she was turned over to the Red Room. There is no record of whether her parents were forced to give her up or not.

The last of her Red Room handlers, and all of her handlers at SHIELD, even Director Fury—they all believe this to be true. Clint is the only one with an inkling of the fact that—

It’s not.

The truth is this: Natasha doesn’t know what year she was born. She doesn’t remember anything about her parents, if there’s anything to know in the first place. She isn’t sure how long it took for her body to become that of an adult with how often they froze her between missions.

Men have never known how to be suspicious of children when it truly mattered, especially young girls with blood red hair, wandering alone in abandoned cities at the height of winter.

She knows she was never wiped once the technology had been developed, because the handlers weren’t sure if her enhancements would protect her from the damage. The Widow was too valuable to risk.

This means that she remembers, in excruciating detail, learning how to kill.

Natasha doesn’t know why the Red Room didn’t gouge the mark from her flesh before she was old enough to properly understand it, but she thinks, now, that it was part of the curriculum. The Red Room coddled and dehumanized the assets by turn. The assets were allowed names. Friendships were permitted, encouraged even. Whispered stories about what their tattoos meant were a favorite of the younger girls in the dorms.

They were handcuffed to the beds each night.

Once, when the Widow trained with the others, she was instructed to shoot one of the candidates. Mariya. And then any of the ones who had flinched as well.

It was an effective curriculum.

The Black Widow first met the Soldat when she was one hundred and six missions old. It was just after he had been acquired from HYDRA; a great victory for the motherland. The Soldat was to be recalibrated so that he could best suit the Red Room’s needs and the Widow was on her way to the next mission. He was docile, but he still warranted a guard of the Red Room’s best fighters.

His eyes—horribly blank, soulless—stared right through her. He was barefoot, with the legs of his pants caught on the bulk of his calves; his ankle, pale and oddly vulnerable looking in the harsh overhead lighting, was a mess of scars.

It seemed he, at least, was not permitted to keep his mark. The Widow wondered if his handlers made him remove himself.

Decades later and less than a year after Clint finds her, Natasha is covering her client in Odessa, arm broken from the crash. She tries not to vomit as she shifts to better cover the client’s head and torso. The Soldier shoots her in the abdomen. Just to the left of her belly button.

* * *

It takes four months and seventeen days for SHIELD to trust that her programming is entirely dormant.

During that time, Natalia is kept in confinement. It’s a small, gray room, gray from floor to ceiling, with absolutely nothing to use against her captors, if she were interested in or needed such things. The only furniture is a bed with a blanket and a low table she’s meant to kneel at, both of which are bolted to the ground. She can’t see any doors or vents and a day’s worth of food is only ever delivered when she’s asleep—truly asleep, and not simply pretending, though they shouldn’t be able to tell the difference—so she doesn’t see how they get it in the room.

No one visits her, but they speak over the intercom—Russian words, practiced and smooth, that are meant to make her comply—and she knows they watch. There’s nothing as amateur as one-way glass, but they watch all the same.

Natalia broke herself of her programming a decade ago, when the Red Room toppled. She locked herself away in a remote bunker known to few, where she was surrounded by the frozen and empty shells of the volunteers that were to render the Soldat obsolete, the ones that had allowed for his sale back to HYDRA just prior to the Red Room’s collapse. She considered shooting them. Didn’t. The knowledge of their location could work to her advantage in the future, and anyway, everyone who would have known to retrieve them was either dead—she had made sure of it—or they had hidden themselves away so thoroughly even the Widow couldn’t find them.

She locked herself away, and she broke her programming—broke down everything the Red Room had molded her into. And then reshaped herself.

Natalia remade herself a decade ago, but it still takes SHIELD one hundred thirty-nine days to understand that for themselves.

On day one hundred forty, the door hidden in the west wall slides open soundlessly and reveals a tall man dressed in black leather. She doesn’t move from where she’s sitting, cross-legged, on the bed. He’s not armed, in the event that she attacks him, but he doesn’t need to be. This entire room was designed to contain and kill.

It’s too bad she’s more or less unkillable.

“My name,” he says as he squares his feet in the doorway and clasps his hands behind his back. He’s posturing, but she’s not easily intimidated. “Is Nicholas Fury, Director of SHIELD. You’ve been quite the thorn in my side, Widow.”

She gives him a smile that’s all teeth.

“Please, Director Fury, call me Natasha.” She does not speak with an accent, to his ear, because he won’t want to hear one. He cocks a skeptical eyebrow at her—the one not mostly covered by his eye patch. She should probably apologize for that at some point. “Natasha Romanoff.”

And with that, she is remade.

* * *

Natasha has only been living in New York for a week when she finds that a scraggly black kitten is living on her fire escape.

She ignores it at first. It’s probably just a stray, and it will move on soon. She’s only been cleared for active duty for little under a year, at this point, and she’s kept plenty busy with SHIELD sanctioned missions that take her around the world for any amount of time at a moment’s notice. Her New York apartment, despite being her home base, is empty more often than not. She can’t possibly care for a kitten, even if she wanted to.

Then: there’s a mission in Eastern Europe that goes sideways before it truly begins, and she spends three weeks moving from village to village, tracking her mark while evading his mercs and the local authorities alike. After the mission is complete, she arrives in New York to the biggest storm of the year, debriefs with Agent Hill, and goes home.

The apartment, of course, is empty and quiet, save for the sound of the rain on the rooftop. The sun set hours ago, only noticeable for the fact that the sky is an ugly purple-black instead of gray. The rivulets of water running down the window cause the light from the streetlamps outside to ripple and dance across the room.

Natasha sighs and reaches up to push the strap of her duffel off her shoulder. It falls to the ground with a soft thud. The air is stale when she breathes in. If she remembers correctly, there isn’t any food in the fridge; anything left will be bad anyway. There might be a packet or two of ramen in the cupboard, but the thought of cooking even that is overwhelming. The scar on her abdomen—only healed because of the serum running through her veins—aches.

Little claws scratch on the window.

Natasha turns her head. It’s the kitten, both of its front paws up on the glass. Even through the distortion from the rain, she can tell it’s wet, pathetic, and decidedly bigger than it was the last time she saw it.

The kitten meows. That’s pathetic too.

Natasha tilts her head. Considers. Can’t believe she’s considering it at all.

The kitten meows again.

Natasha rolls her eyes at herself and goes to open the window. The kitten refuses to take its paws off the glass at first. Natasha stares it down and loses. Finally, it drops down on all four feet and she eases the glass up.

“Hello there,” she says, low and soft in the way most people usually talk to animals. She reaches a hand out, slowly, and the kitten sniffs her finger. Rain slips down from the holes in the fire escape and lands on her sleeve.

Before she can pull back, it bites her.

< Ouch, > she mutters, pulling her hand back to hold it against her chest. < Little monster. >

The kitten purrs. Natasha squints at it.

< Are you coming in? > she asks it, and then feels stupid that she’s talking to a cat in Russian in the middle of the night.

The kitten comes in and plops down right on the windowsill. Natasha raises her eyebrows, bemused, but the kitten doesn’t seem like it’s planning on moving anytime soon. The water will probably ruin the wood, but she finds she doesn’t care.

And that’s how Natasha, despite being an internationally known spy with more confirmed kills than she cares to list, is unofficially adopted by a cat.

She names him Liho.

* * *

Natalie Rushman is everything that has ever enticed Tony Stark: flashy, talented, dangerous, and held just outside of his reach.

Everyday, Natalie watches the poison from his reactor creep further through Tony Stark’s body, watches the tattoo on the pale underside of his forearm darken as he tumbles further and further into love, because he makes no effort to hide either.

The tattoo is elegant and tasteful, mimicking the person it belongs to. A line of seven ashen sunflowers that match the pallor of his skin.

From the liberal application of some very expensive wine, Natalie discovers that Ms. Potts has a generous collection of tattoos, accumulated from years of loving people selflessly. Most of them have faded over the years as their paths have moved them away from one another and Ms. Potts stops feeling quite so strongly for that person. One is still vivid: a stylized heart between her collarbone and shoulder that is so vibrantly red she struggles to wear certain color blouses at times.

Natalie Rushman has one tattoo other than her own simple five-pointed star: a small mountain range, gray now, from her high school sweetheart who died while they were in college. It was a car accident; very unexpected, but at least he didn’t suffer. She doesn’t like to talk about it much, for obvious reasons.

Natasha never worries that someone will one day discover her tattoo on their skin. They would have to love her, and to do that they would have to know her true self. Some days, she surprises herself by even having her own mark, because Natasha is not always sure she knows who she is meant to be, below the masks.

* * *

Captain Steve Rogers does not trust her.

Fury reassigns them to D.C. in the last week of May, following the attack on New York. Natasha breaks the lease on her one bedroom apartment with very little fanfare—there’s hardly anything personal to pack away, for security reasons—but she goes out and buys a cat carrier the same day she receives her assignment. Liho technically doesn’t belong to her, but he doesn’t belong to anyone else either, and Nat isn’t leaving him behind.

She _wishes_ she could leave Rogers behind.

Fury’s orders were clear—Natasha is meant to keep an eye on Rogers, ostensibly to ensure he’s settling in, but also to notice any signs that he’s becoming a threat. Nat wonders about that. Captain America is the country’s most beloved hero and historical figure. Steve Rogers, it seems, is more of a wildcard.

Still. Fury’s orders mean she finds herself trailing Rogers, their first official day assigned at the Triskelion. Rogers received a tour of the building—or the areas that he has access to—from a very nice young woman named Aliya. Natasha watches him watch Aliya adjust her headscarf at one point, but there’s nothing in his expression other than polite curiosity as she explains the different stations in the cafeteria.

He glances at Natasha too, every once in a while, and he’s decidedly more annoyed at those times. She knows she’s being transparent—Natasha has been a SHIELD agent for years, she doesn’t exactly need a tour—but she’s interested in seeing how he reacts when he knows he’s being observed.

Aliya hands them off to Devon, from HR, who has a towering stack of paperwork for Rogers.

 _Paperwork._ For _Captain America._ Nat gleefully stores that image away to share with Clint and Laura, later.

Rogers fills out every form, but—when he knows Natasha is the only one looking at him—he lets her see the way the muscle in his jaw ticks, the tension in the fingers that hold the pen.

Natasha doesn’t think he wants to be here. It’s too bad SHIELD tends to be very good at getting what _they_ want, and they’re always searching for new assets.

She wonders what arguments they used to recruit Rogers, or if they just told him he had to continue serving in this new capacity. It makes her frown, but it’s not as though SHIELD has the cleanest track record; the weapons meant for the Tesseract were proof of that.

It’s past noon by the time he actually speaks to her. Natasha is almost impressed; most SHIELD agents would have caved within the first half hour.

“Do you not have an assignment, Agent Romanoff?” Rogers asks.

Nat looks up from where she’s picking celery out of her chicken salad sandwich. Rogers’ face is quietly expectant. Like she’s just going to jump up and run away the moment she faces any sort of discouragement. Or maybe he’s looking for her to fight back.

“Nope,” she says.

Rogers gives her a flat stare. “I didn’t think spies spent much time outside of the field.”

Nat picks at another piece of celery. She _hates_ celery, and the existence of that opinion still delights her to no end. She shrugs.

“Fury reassigned me,” she tells him. “Doesn’t think it’s good for me to be running covert ops, after New York.”

She doesn’t look up to see Roger’s reaction. It’s true, her explanation, in a manner of speaking. It’s not the best time for her to be in the field, and she’s certainly worked under worse conditions. But she’s more useful here, playing at spy-slash-babysitter, so here is where she’s at, for now.

Rogers doesn’t need to know that part.

Nat watches his hands in her peripheral vision, the way they flex around the cafeteria silverware. It must take an incredible amount of self restraint for him to not bend the metal clean in half in an instant. She purses her lips and glances up. He’s already watching her with a detached sort of amusement. Like he’s resigned himself to whatever happens next.

Well fuck that.

Nat cocks her right eyebrow. She doesn’t smirk; he won’t respond well to that right now, and she wants to goad him, not piss him off.

Not too much, anyway.

She says, “What are your thoughts on training in that gym Aliya showed us?”

The corner of Rogers’ mouth twitches up.

*

They train.

She has been alive almost as long as Rogers at this point—likely longer, when you consider that she wasn’t frozen for nearly seventy uninterrupted years. She’s met so many enhanced individuals, and she’s fought many of them. She was trained by the Soldier himself. She fought two of Karpov’s volunteers at once and won. She has the serum—maybe not the one the Americans devised, but she’s undoubtedly enhanced.

And yet, Steve Roger’s is like no one on earth.

His body is a marvel, his strength absolutely astonishing. Natasha watches as he destroys a punching bag, and then another, without breaking a sweat. He always cleans up the mess, after the fact. She watches him sprint without tiring for hour, in circles around the gym because the treadmill doesn’t have a high enough setting. The weight machines, she knows, aren’t enough to challenge him.

And all this, from a man less than a month out of the ice. He hadn’t had the benefit of carefully supervised cryo and endless handlers either. Just his body and the serum against the ice. He should have been dead; barring that, his muscles, his endurance, should have wasted away _decades_ ago.

She knows he’s holding back.

They train separately for a week, not interacting at all beyond an occasional nod during water breaks, but still within each other’s field of vision. She thinks Rogers does it on purpose, and she can’t understand it: his obvious frustration with her presence, and yet, his allowance of her surveillance. It’s baffling.

On day eight, she gets fed up. Gives up on the paperwork she’s been half-assing all morning and stalks into the gym.

“Spar?” she asks. Rogers has already been here for at least an hour, judging by the ring of sweat on the collar of his shirt.

Rogers sizes her up, then shrugs.

There’s a large mat, meant for sparring, off to one side of the gym. Rogers follows her over, and sort of swings his arms as Natasha settles into her stretches. She might be enhanced, but that’s no reason to be stupid.

She understands, in the first second, why he didn’t bother with stretching.

He’s holding back, more than she would have guessed simply from watching him. Natasha tries every move she knows—maneuvers that have taken out men larger than Rogers easily—but he doesn’t budge. Combinations that leveled the Soldier are useless against Rogers. It’s like fighting a rockslide.

A rockslide that’s pulling his punches. She can feel his restraint every time she touches him. It’s less obvious the longer they fight and the more creative Nat gets, but there’s no denying the tension in his muscles. The way he checks himself before striking back.

Nat tries to wrangle him into some sort of hold. Doesn’t have the momentum to pin him for more than a heartbeat. He’s up again before she can adjust her grip, and then she’s the one face down on the mat. He has her arm twisted up and back, and yanks it a little when she tries to break free. Even if he were to pull it further back her arm isn’t in any danger of being broken. His control is astonishing.

“I yield,” she says, sweaty face sticking slightly to the mat.

Rogers releases her instantly. He offers her a hand up and Nat takes it as the gesture of goodwill that it is.

They don’t talk as they get water. Nat has a stitch in her side and she’s slick with sweat. Rogers lifts the bottom of his shirt to wipe his face, but he’s not even winded.

Nat catches a glimpse of a tattoo on his abdomen. She looks away quickly.

Eventually, Rogers says, “That wasn’t too bad.”

Nat scowls at him.

“What?” Rogers asks. He smirks. “Not used to losing?”

She isn’t, but that’s not why she’s annoyed.

“You pulled your punches,” she tells him, and holds up her water bottle before he can respond. “I could tell.”

He shrugs and reaches up to push some hair from his face. It flops down again the moment he pulls his hand away.

“I couldn’t exactly kill you while sparring. The paperwork alone would be a nightmare.” The smirk turns into something more self-deprecating. “I guess I’m still learning how much the serum actually changed. The war wasn’t the best time for that.”

Nat lets her gaze slide past him toward the free weights as she thinks. It makes sense, but he’s going to have to work on it.

She grimaces.

 _They’re_ going to have to work on it.

* * *

Nat and Rogers continue to train. Fury seems to be waiting for some sort of signal to start sending them on missions but she doesn’t know what it is. This means that she and Rogers spend a lot of time in the gym, because the alternatives are: Nat holing up in her tiny, out of the way office; Nat bothering Rogers in his office, which is much nicer and has large windows overlooking the Potomac; eating lunch in the cafeteria where every dish seems to involve celery, in some capacity.

The choice is obvious, really.

Nat almost feels guilty, sometimes, that she isn’t helping the analysts pick through chatter or develop extraction plans for agents whose missions have gone wrong. But then she’ll remember that she’s technically on assignment—even if it just means long afternoons sparring in the gym—and that brings a different sort of guilt.

To distract herself, Nat comes up with drills to challenge herself and Rogers. Ways he can better learn his abilities while they figure out how to work together. A lot of the drills involve Rogers throwing her with his shield, like they did in New York, or him picking her up to change her initial angle of attack.

She can admit that it’s fun. Sometimes, she even catches Rogers grinning, so she thinks he might agree with her on that.

Steve’s birthday is spent with neither of them acknowledging the occasion beyond the cupcake Nat leaves on his desk in the morning. Instead, they start writing down the more crazy maneuvers they’ve coming up with. Nat finds a whiteboard in a supply closet and they make good use of it.

They only train together about half the time. The rest of the time, Nat runs or lifts weights, and depending on the day, the background noise is either one of her Spotify playlists blasting on the speaker system or—on bad days, though Nat has yet to pick up on the pattern that leads to him having bad days—the sound of Steve taking out his aggression on one of the punching bags. He goes through so many that, if he were anyone else, Nat thinks it would probably get taken out of his paycheck.

It’s on one of these days, part way through July, when they’re interrupted.

Occasionally, someone else will come in to use the gym at the same time, or an agent or two will want to watch them spar, but that’s not the type of interruption she means.

Nat is running on a treadmill, earbuds in but no music playing, when the door on the far wall opens. She’s positioned that she gets a look at them before Rogers does, since his back is to the door. The two men step inside just as Rogers busts open another heavy bag. This happens so frequently that Seth, the head of the custodial staff, has learned to leave a rolling trash barrel, push broom, and dustpan in the corner of the gym at all times. Otherwise, Rogers will dig through closets he’s not supposed to have access to until he finds the right supplies. He never wants to leave more of a mess for the custodians to clean up.

The men watch as Rogers drags the supplies over. One of them is tall and built like a rugby player, but he’s not the leader. The slighter, dark haired one is. They both have STRIKE patches on the shoulders of their jackets.

Natasha has never met STRIKE Team Alpha, not even when she and Barton used to run Delta missions. But she’s been listening to the rumors about Brock Rumlow, the revolutionary up-and-coming agent turned STRIKE leader, for long enough that she recognizes him now. She’s never really approved of the things she hears about his methods, but criticizing other agents when a mission isn’t on the line has always been above her paygrade.

Natasha pulls the hood of her sweatshirt up and keeps running.

The agents intercept Rogers on his way back to the bag, where a pile of sand continues to grow.

“Captain Rogers,” Rumlow says, holding out his hand. It’s meant to make Rogers abandon his task in order to acknowledge him, but Rogers only nods his head and keeps walking. A muscle twitches in Rumlow’s jaw. After a moment, he pulls his hand back and follows. “My name is Brock Rumlow. I’m the commander of STRIKE.”

He doesn’t explain what STRIKE is. It’s another play for power, but Natasha and Rogers have been training together for close to two months now, and they spend plenty of their time in the Triskelion together otherwise. Nat has seen the wall of sticky notes behind Rogers’ desk, where he’s creating a web of all his questions and notes about the past seventy years, all the people, events, and items he feels he needs to read about.

Of course he’s researched STRIKE.

Natasha reaches up and adjusts her left earbud. It draws the attention of the other agent, who’s favoring his right side, but he looks away just as quickly. She’s not why they’re here, and that makes her unimportant.

These boys have a lot to learn.

“Are you here with a mission?” Rogers asks. He leans the broom against the side of the trashcan, hand hovering for a moment to ensure it won’t shift. When he’s satisfied it’s steady, Rogers sinks smoothly onto one knee, his back to Natasha, and starts sweeping sand into the dustpan.

“No,” Rumlow tells him. He looms over Rogers’ kneeling form, hands clasped behind his back. He watches Rogers work in silence. Then: “Just leave it.”

Rogers’ whole body goes rigid and he tilts his head to stare up at Rumlow. She can’t see his face, but she can see Rumlow’s. Rogers says, “Excuse me?”

“There are people paid to do that,” Rumlow says, disbelieving amusement lacing his words. He smirks at his friend. “May as well let them do it. Just move on to the next bag, Cap.”

Steve drops the dustpan. It clangs dully on the floor mat as Steve pushes his way to his feet. Standing at attention, he has several inches on Rumlow, and Steve uses them to his advantage as he bears down on him.

If it were anyone else, Natasha might scoff and roll her eyes. But she knows this isn’t a testosterone-fueled showdown; it’s—

She isn’t sure what exactly it is she’s witnessing. But she knows that Steve knows about Seth’s classes at the community college, and his two kids. About the fact that Bertila’s mom is sick, and how Jess is saving up to buy a ring for her girlfriend. Natasha is aware of these things because it’s her job; Steve is because he cares.

She also knows Steve Rogers doesn’t pick fights he doesn’t intend to finish. Especially on someone else’s behalf.

Steve doesn’t say anything. He just crowds himself into Rumlow’s personal space and waits. He’s a mountain of certainty and stubbornness.

Natasha pulls out her earbuds, pushes her hood down, and turns the treadmill off. She doesn’t bother waiting for the belt to stop completely before stepping off. She doesn’t approach, but she doesn’t have to. They just need to know she’s watching in the first place.

Rumlow’s eyes dart in her direction and catch on her hair. It’s not much of a distraction, but it’s enough.

A black widow is most easily identified by her warning signs, red as blood.

He backs off.

“Suit yourself.” He heads for the door, and his friend follows. “Fury will have a mission lined up soon. Nice to meet you, Cap.”

Rumlow and his friend turn and leave. Rogers spares her a glance and a small smile and Natasha nods in response. He kneels back down and reaches for the dustpan.

She trusts Rumlow less than ever after that little display. But she also finds that she trusts Rogers more.

* * *

Their first mission is little more than a milk run, so easy that Hill doesn’t even bother to assign STRIKE as their backup. Director Fury generally doesn’t believe in easing agents in, but he also doesn’t believe in wasting resources.

This is a test, then: to see how well they work together, if Rogers can handle undercover work, if he’s just too recognizable regardless of his talent.

Their mission is in north central Florida, in the small college city called Gainesville. They hitch a ride with STRIKE Alpha—who’s on their way to São Paulo for their own mission that Natasha technically shouldn’t know the details of—and get dropped off in a tiny town southeast of the city. There’s an old safe house, complete with some expired cans of food and a car from the last century and not much else.

Rogers looks around at the dust coating every surface and makes a face at Natasha. She shrugs in response and says, “Not a lot of missions here.”

Rogers, possibly remembering the main street comprised mostly of antique stores, says, “Yeah. I picked up on that.”

The mission goes off almost without a hitch. They’re tailing some college kid who’s managed to fall in with the sort of people SHIELD likes to keep an eye on. If the kid seems like he actually knows anything useful, or displays any evidence of mutations, Natasha is supposed to collect him and then they’ll wait for extraction. If he’s clueless, Rogers will give him a “you’re disappointing Captain America” speech and leave him be for now.

It’s mid-August, about a week before the local colleges and university start back up again. Mid-August in Florida, as they learn, is also the worst time of the year. The humidity makes Natasha’s hair curl like crazy and she sweats through every shirt she brought. It rains every afternoon like clockwork and the college students are practically crawling out of the woodwork.

On Friday, the night after they arrive, their mark leavings his crappy student housing and goes to a shitty club that’s packed despite the DJ’s poor taste in music. For the occasion, Nat breaks out a platinum blonde wig and a dress that clings to her hips and breasts, and buys Rogers a pair of jeans that makes it seem like he has an ass. There isn’t much she can do about his hair, still carefully parted and gelled back despite her efforts to change it, but it’s a start.

“Is there a reason we’re here?” Rogers yells, bending down enough that she can hear him over the pounding bass. “This really isn’t what I had in mind.”

Nat smiles at him and leans her whole body into his, sliding a hand up his chest and around the back of his neck. Rogers, to his credit, presses his hand against her back, lower than she thinks he usually would. The blue lighting makes his face look more angular.

She isn’t surprised that this has him uncomfortable. Rogers’ strengths lie in his abilities as a soldier, not a spy. But that’s just part of the test.

“If there’s anything I know about college kids,” she says, loud enough for him to pick up, “It’s that they’ll do stupid stuff when their drunk.”

“Such as meeting with contacts at a club.” Rogers scans the crowd. Their mark has already gotten one drink from the bar, and he’s disappeared somewhere in the crowd. “There’s plenty of cover here.”

“I know,” she says, and pulls him toward the best vantage point in the building. It’s on the edge of the dance floor, off to the side of the DJ station, where the music is the loudest. She hopes Rogers’ hearing isn’t so sensitive that this spot is painful; they’ll have to talk, soon, about what his serum enhanced and how it differed from her own. She maneuvers them so that Rogers is facing the majority of the club; with his height, he can see over most of the crowd. She’ll keep an eye on the bathrooms.

He’s more resistant to dancing but Nat gives him a pointed look and swings her hips and he follows along. The man has a sad sense of rhythm but it’s enough to work with.

It’s easy to let her body move with the pulsing beat as she scans the parts of the club she can see easily. The mark must be behind her, lost somewhere in the crush of bodies, but she doesn’t recognize any of the other faces from the mission packet. Yet.

Rogers leans down, places his hand on the back of her thigh. “He’s approaching another man.”

Nat swings around and presses her back to Rogers’ chest as he moves his hand to cover the majority of her stomach. A drop of sweat slides from her hairline down to her chin. She moves with the music as she watches.

The mark certainly is approaching someone else. The body language could be a cover, but she doesn’t think they’re faking it.

She reaches up and grips the back of his neck, pulls him down so he can hear her say, “I think it’s just a hookup.”

Rogers hums and she can feel it against her skin even with the bass thudding in her bones.

They watch the two men wind their way through the crowd, heading toward the back corner where the bathrooms are. Rogers’ face is still next to hers.

“Do you want me to–?” Rogers starts.

Nat nods.

He pulls away and follows them.

Nat finds the nearest interested body and dances with them until Rogers comes back. It doesn’t take long. She separates herself from the crowd and gets a kiss on the cheek as she goes. She tilts her head to look up at him. He shakes his head.

 _Hookup_ , he mouths. She thinks he might be blushing, but it’s hard to tell in this light.

The mark leaves not long after the hookup and at least two more drinks, and she realizes he really is just a kid. Probably barely old enough to drink, at least legally. But youth doesn’t mean innocence—her own childhood is a testament to that—so Nat isn’t ready to give the all clear yet.

*

The next morning, the kid leaves far earlier than Nat would have expected from someone who’s more than likely hungover to go to a natural history museum, of all places. Nat and Rogers split up at the door; he stays in the lobby, making polite conversation with the older gentleman checking tickets for the special exhibit, while she carefully tails the kid in case this is actually a front for meeting a contact.

The sightlines are terrible, with lots of corners and few windows or mirrors, but the advantage of a museum means it’s not unusual to go through the exhibits surrounded by the same group of strangers, if they all happen to be moving at the same pace.

The longer she stays, though, the more she enjoys it, beyond the job at hand.

As part of the exhibit on Florida ecosystems, there’s a hallway that’s a replica of an estuary, twelve times larger than real life. She steps through the doorway—approximately thirty seconds before the mark plans to, if she timed it correctly—and stops. Blue light filters down from the ceiling, rippling across the floor. Hidden speakers play the sounds of running water, overlaid with clicks and whistles, presumably from the replicated wildlife. The walls are covered in giant weeds and barnacles bigger than her both of her fists, and there’s a fish that’s longer than she is tall.

Nat pretends to be engrossed in reading one of informational signs near the end of the hallway when the mark passes her, shuddering. Apparently, the kid doesn’t like fish. She files the information away, in case he does end up being a threat, and follows him into the next room, sort of wishing she could stay a little longer.

He does, however, like the replica cave, and Natasha can’t blame him. It feels just as soothing and removed from the rest of the museum as the estuary hallway had, but it’s also quieter, darker. She can hear kids shrieking in the distance, and thunder from the latest storm rolling in from the west, but it’s dampened. Distant.

It reminds her, inexplicably, of the way cryo felt after the initial pain of being frozen. The sensation of being cocooned in nothingness, only vaguely aware of what happens outside of the storage container.

She’s glad when the kid moves on.

They make their way through the last of the exhibits: the butterfly collection. It’s incredible really, a wall at least thirty feet tall and four times as long covered in preserved specimen. Some are the size of her thumb nail while others are as large as both of her hands together.

Windows line the wall below the collection, and they look into the work spaces of the lepidopterology department, who—a sign informs her—are the ones responsible for the preservation of new specimen. It’s a Saturday, so she expects the area to be empty, but Nat scans it, briefly, to be safe. Nothing; a work-in-progress; nothing; a woman bent over a microscope—

She knows that face.

Nat loses sight of the target.

That _face_ —where?

The woman straightens, and Nat is breathless, as though Rogers just punched her in the gut, because she was right. She does know that face.

Irina, one of the first after Natalia. The thorn in Peggy Carter’s side for far too long.

She should be dead, Natalia received news of her death while still in the Red Room, so _how_ —

Irina turns and looks straight at Natalia. Her hair is white, her face wrinkled. She looks as old as Natalia should. When she realizes who Natalia is, she flinches.

Then her hands come up, and Natalia’s hand is on her weapon before she can process that Irina is signing something to her, in the language the girls created among themselves and passed down for decades.

 _Choice_ , Irina signs. She does it again, deliberately including the possessive pronoun this time. _My choice._

She understands. She made her choice—she’s not the thing the Red Room made her to be. She _isn’t_.

Her fingers tremble as she pulls them away from the garrote disguised as a bracelet on her wrist. It’s probably a good thing she couldn’t bring a concealed gun into the building, because Irina would have been dead.

She takes a breath. Irina is still watching her, hands clearly visible. Non-threatening.

Someone rounds the corner.

“There you are, dear!” Rogers says, voice painfully cheerful. “I was worried you’d gotten lost in the exhibits!”

He approaches her but doesn’t touch. At the edge of her vision, she sees him glance at Irina through the glass. He doesn’t have his shield—too bulky, too obvious—but he doesn’t need it. Rogers’ entire body is a weapon. She’s known that since day one.

She wonders if he knows the same is true about her.

Irina turns and disappears into the back of the work space.

“Romanoff?” Rogers asks. She doesn’t flinch, just watches the room on the other side of the glass for movement. He reaches out and presses the tips of his fingers to her shoulder blade “Natasha. Hey, look at me.”

She looks.

Rogers stares down at her, a worried crease between his eyebrows. His big shoulders are hunched in an attempt to make himself look non-threatening. He asks, “Everything okay?"

She takes another breath and then she nods.

“Yeah,” Nat says.

Rogers tilts his head in the direction of the glass. “Is that anything we should be worried about?”

“No,” she tells him. Nat links their arms together. “Just… someone I thought was dead.”

They start walking toward the lobby.

“Okay,” Rogers says.

They pass under a vent blasting A/C; Nat resists the urge to shudder.

“Sorry I lost the mark,” she says.

Rogers steers her toward the exit. “It’s okay, I left him in the gift shop.”

*

In the end, they’re fairly certain the kid has nothing to do with the group SHIELD is watching. Steve gives him the “disappointed Captain America” speech in a little coffee shop, and they retreat back to the safe house. In the past, Natasha may have collected him for interrogation anyway, just to be safe, but when she suggests it Rogers shakes his head and says, “No.”

Nat leans back in the overstuffed armchair and looks over her shoulder, raising an eyebrow at him. Rogers is at the kitchen counter, holding a mug of what could possibly be called coffee, if one was generous. They’re waiting for STRIKE to circle back around and extract them, and they’ve already had half-aborted versions of this conversation twice.

“If we say he’s innocent, we need to respect that,” Rogers says.

“But we’re only mostly sure he’s innocent,” Nat points out.

Rogers laughs. “You didn’t go into that bathroom. Unless there was a secret code involved, they definitely weren’t trading classified military intel.”

He has a point.

“And,” he continues, “we were watching him the entire time he was in the museum. He stayed home all day yesterday, minus the coffee shop, and we monitored all incoming and outgoing transmissions. Thanks to Hill, we know the drop was happening this weekend.”

“And that means it wasn’t him,” she finishes.

Nat sighs, and then sneezes from the dust.

“We did a good job ensuring it wasn’t him,” Rogers says. “Now we stand by that. Freedom isn’t freedom if it’s conditional.”

She’s never thought of it that way. Nat smiles at him.

“Okay Rogers,” she says. “You win.”

He grins, pleased. Nat looks away.

* * *

Sometime in early September, not long after their first mission in Florida, Natasha and Rogers find themselves with nothing to do on a Friday afternoon. They’re in Rogers’ office, discussing a potential maneuver that involves the shield, Natasha’s Widow bites, and a metal floor. She isn’t too proud to admit they broke out the whiteboard.

Needless to say, they’re bored out of their minds.

Natasha swings herself around in the swivel chair. When she stops, she’s facing the Wall of Questions, as she’s dubbed it. By this point, Rogers’ has gone through more than two pads of multicolored sticky notes and they’re sprawled across most of the available wall space.

She tilts her head. Rogers stops drawing on the whiteboard.

“What are you thinking?” he asks.

Natasha darts her eyes over to him. His hair is still carefully parted and combed back, though he’s taken her hint with the jeans seriously and done his best to update his wardrobe.

“Have you been to the mall yet?”

The blank look on his face is answer enough.

*

The first place Natasha leads Steve to, weaving through the crowds of excited tourists and exasperated local shoppers, is the salon. A barbershop might be cheaper, more familiar, but this isn’t meant to be familiar. She understands the appeal of routine, but she also knows that it will just as easily smother you as provide guidance.

Steve takes one look at their destination and plants his feet by the bench across from the storefront. Natasha sidles up to him as he crosses his arms. The cut of his leather jacket does nothing to disguise the width of his shoulders.

Natasha tilts her head up and to the side. She waits.

“You really think this is a good idea?” Steve asks. He doesn’t look at her. The woman at the register is probably scared out of her wits.

Natasha presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth for a moment.

“Ultimately,” she says, “it’s your choice.”

Steve glances down at her. He’s forbidding and stern with the way he looks down the line of his nose. She doesn’t care for the set of his mouth.

“Steve,” Natasha says. She pivots to stand perpendicular to his shoulder. Keeps her hands motionless and loose at her sides. “It’s your choice.”

He shifts his gaze back to the salon and squares his shoulders. He looks for all the world like he’s about to go into battle.

Natasha reaches out and presses two of her fingers to the spot above his elbow. Steve doesn’t flinch.

He steps forward, toward the salon, already shrugging off his jacket and handing it to Natasha. The young woman at the cash register smiles, the brave soul. Her dark hair is braided around the crown of her head. Nat thinks she could imitate the style, if she grew her hair out. Maybe she will.

“I’ll be right back,” Natasha says. Steve looks over his shoulder and there’s something helpless caught in his gaze.

Natasha gives him a half smile and starts back toward the book store they passed on their way to the salon. It doesn’t take long to find what she’s looking for.

She’s back at the salon five minutes later, small shopping bag in tow. She finds Steve in the chair, shoulders tense as the stylist turns on the clippers.

Steve catches sight of her in the mirror. The skin around his eyes is tight.

“ _Descúlpeme_ ,” Natasha says. The stylist turns around, smiling again. < Maybe only scissors, this time. >

She looks between Steve and Natasha and nods, saying, “Of course.”

Natasha hovers as the stylist calmly trims back Steve’s hair into a modern style. It’s quiet in the salon, removed from the busyness of the rest of the building. His shoulders slowly relax, and at the end, he even gives the stylist a small, kind smile. Natasha pays, ignoring Steve’s protests, and tips very well.

They step back out into the bustle of the mall and walk for a ways. Despite the crowds, they aren’t jostled by anyone as they pass.

“Hey, so,” Natasha starts. Steve doesn’t glance at her, but he follows when she steps out of the flow of traffic. Natasha holds out the bag. “This is for you.”

Steve takes it, peers inside. He glances up at her, surprise in the tilt of his eyebrows. Natasha nods once.

He reaches into the bag and pulls out a notebook, small enough to fit in the pocket of his jeans.

“To replace the wall of questions,” she says, by way of explanation. “So you can have it on you whenever.”

Steve looks down at the notebook for a moment longer. It looks comically tiny in his hands. Then: “Thank you, Natasha.”

She smiles, though he isn’t looking. They start walking toward the exit, and Nat allows Steve to use his broad shoulders to plow a path through the crowd.

“You know,” Steve says. “I actually had some ideas about the uniform.”

Nat smiles again. This time he catches it, and the smile he gives back is sharp.

“Let’s see what we can do,” she tells him.

* * *

After she gives him the notebook things are different. They still work out in the SHIELD gym a few times a week; the serum made Steve inhumanly strong to begin with, but he learns to push his body further and further, accomplishes things she would have thought impossible for any person. Nat claims the extra chair in Steve’s office as her own, because it’s more comfortable than the one in her shoebox of an office. They eat lunch together sometimes, in the SHIELD cafeteria or at a nearby restaurant, depending on their assignments for the day. But still, it’s—different. Steve is more likely to smile, though it’s only a tiny sliver of a thing, and he’s more likely to smile in her direction.

Everytime he does, Nat feels like she’s learned something new about him, but it’s not the type of thing to type up in a report for Fury.

Then, in the second week of October, Deputy Director Hill herself stops by Steve’s office.

Hill doesn’t bother knocking on the door. She just lets herself in, easy confidence in the set of her shoulders. She’s dressed in a jumpsuit; Natasha doesn’t think she’s ever seen Hill wear civilian clothes.

“Rogers, Romanoff,” Hill says. Like she expected to find them together. They pull their gazes away from the whiteboard and snap to attention.

Natasha feels unsettled at the simple way Hill said the both of their names. She wonders if this new assignment is meant to reveal more than just Roger’s weak spots.

“Yes ma’am,” Rogers says. “What can we do for you?”

Hill pulls a paper file from under her left arm and holds it out. Natasha takes it because she’s closer. If she had to guess, they’re receiving a paper file because SHIELD seems to be operating under the assumption that Rogers isn’t fond of technology.

She hasn’t attempted to inform them otherwise in any of her reports.

“I have a mission for you,” Hill says. “The details are in the file. Your job is to secure the area prior to Professor Amanat’s arrival in New York. We want this to be covert, but STRIKE will be backing you up outside of the initial perimeter.”

Natasha nods. Hill pivots on her heel and exits the room as quickly as she appeared.

Rogers holds out his hand. She passes the file off. She watches as he reads, doesn’t miss the crease that forms between his eyebrows.

“So. We’ll be in Brooklyn,” Steve says.

*

It is enlightening to see Steve in an environment where he expects to be comfortable. He seemingly knows every nook and cranny of his old neighborhood, but Natasha also sees the way he’s constantly caught off guard by the changes. He’ll start on a story from his childhood and turn to point out the area where it occurred, only to be confused when he finds a bakery instead of a seamstress or an apartment building instead of an empty lot.

The tour is all a cover, of course. They know at least one of the food trucks contains operatives looking to harm Professor Amanat. When they stop for milkshakes—which are actually as good as Natasha tells Steve, though she overacts it a bit for the sake of the waiter listening to their conversation—she picks up on the monitoring devices in the high corners and Steve points out the undercover operatives to her with each flick of his eyes. Their contact with STRIKE has been cut off, so they won’t be able to call for backup if they end up needing it.

The two of them leave the ice cream shop and stroll down the sidewalk. Natasha links her arm with Steve’s.

Their tails are sloppy, but even worse, they’re slow.

Steve and Natasha have time to scale the building and pull off their civilian clothes before the tails have even reached the mouth of the alley they ducked down. Steve unearths his shield from the compartment built into the roof. Natasha adjusts her Widow bite gauntlets.

Below, the two operatives start down the alley.

“I bet we could pull off shield maneuver number seventeen,” Natasha tells him. Maneuver seventeen involves a clothesline and Natasha’s continued ability to pirouette on command.

Steve tips his head back and laughs. Nat smirks at him as she levers her body up to balance on the roof ledge.

“You ready?” she asks.

Steve shoves his helmet on and clicks the strap closed. “Yep.”

[*](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14973110)

They pull off maneuver number seventeen. It’s awesome.

* * *

Officially, Natasha Romanoff’s birthday is on November 22nd. It’s just another fabrication but Clint has never let that stop him from making a lot of noise for a day she had arbitrarily picked off a calendar sometime in the late 90s. She appreciates it for what it is: a celebration of her choices and her freedom, rather than the simple fact of her creation.

In the past, once November 20th rolled around without orders, Nat and Clint would pile into his crappy old Honda Passport and make the drive to the farm so they could celebrate Nat’s birthday with Laura and, later, the kids. Of course, no roadtrip with Clint was complete without all of the essential Roadtrip Snacks, which meant they spent the next two days in a close approximation of a continuous sugar high.

Years when they were out in the field, Clint always made sure they were shipped out together. It didn’t matter what was happening—an infiltration or a stake out or anything else—the moment he realized it was the 22nd, Clint would sing happy birthday to her under his breath, as tone deaf as always.

Nat wakes up before sunrise alone in her mostly empty D.C. apartment that year. She lays on her back and stares up at the ceiling, feeling sorry for herself, as light creeps across the room. At some point, Liho comes in from the hall. Nat pats the bed and he hops up and curls beside her, purring. She runs her fingertips down the length of his spine over and over.

The phone rings.

Nat reaches out without looking and grabs it off the bedside table. Answers it and says, “Romanoff.”

“ _Happy birthday to you_ ,” the Barton family sings, discordant and off pitch. Lila, who’s only three and a half, shrieks enthusiastically. “ _Happy birthday to you!_ ”

Nat stares up at the ceiling and blinks away tears as they finish singing. She sniffs, slightly.

“Thanks guys,” she says, once they’ve quieted down some.

“You’re welcome!” Cooper says. He’s six years old and very concerned with being polite. “Auntie Nat, guess what Lila did yesterday!”

As Cooper chatters on, Nat hauls herself up and out of bed. She pads over to the dresser and pulls out her favorite sweater, an old thing worn soft with time. She stole it from Laura within a month of meeting her and Laura, saint that she is, never asked for it back. The collar catches on her curls so she rolls her shoulders and shakes her head.

She makes her way to the kitchen, the tiled floor cold against her bare feet, making encouraging noises as Cooper transitions into a story about losing his first tooth last week. Nat measures out scoops of coffee grounds into the machine, flips the switch to turn it on.

She turns to lean back against the counter, and that’s when she sees it.

“Hey bud?” Cooper stops talking about the star names he’s learning about. “Can I talk to one of your parents?”

“Yeah!” he says. “Mommy is right here.”

There’s some muffled sounds on the other end of the line as the phone gets passed from one hand to another, and then Laura says, “Natasha?”

“Hi Laura,” Nat says evenly. She stares at the little box on her kitchen table. There’s a card propped up beside it. The card has a bee on the front, with the caption _Happy Bee-day!_ “How did Clint get it in my apartment?”

Laura laughs and doesn’t answer the question. She hadn’t expected an answer, not really. “Do you like it?”

Nat steps closer to the table and picks up the card. The inside is full of scribbles from Lila, words carefully printed by Cooper, and a short note signed from both Laura and Clint. Nat smiles down at it before setting it aside and reaching for the box. There’s no ribbon or tape, so the cover comes off easily.

Inside the box sits a small arrow, strung between two lengths of delicate silver chain.

Nat huffs out a laugh.

“I love it,” she says, feeling overwhelmingly fond. “I’m assuming you picked it out?”

“I may have assisted the process,” Laura hedges. It’s quiet for a minute as Nat pulls the necklace out of the box and manages to close the clasp with one hand. “We miss you.”

Sadness flares in her chest before she tamps it down. “I miss you too. All of you.”

She hears Clint’s voice, distant and almost inaudible.

“Here,” Laura tells him.

And then Clint says, “Tasha. Happy birthday.”

“Thank you.” The coffee machine stops gurgling, so Nat turns back to the cupboards and takes down her second favorite mug. Her first favorite, a mug Cooper painted himself and gave to her last year, is sitting in a cupboard at the Barton farm. She can’t have it with her—it would be hard to explain the presence of something obviously created by a child when, as far as everyone is concerned, she doesn’t know any—but she wishes she could be at the farm, using it. “How’re things there?”

“Well,” Clint says, “Laura’s angry because I still haven’t fixed the front steps—”

Laura interjects to defend herself, so Clint puts the phone back on speaker, and that’s how Nat passes her morning: drinking coffee in her muted, impersonal kitchen, listening to Clint and Laura bicker, and wishing desperately she could be there with them. But she leaves for a mission tomorrow morning and there’s no way she could have made the travel work.

Knowing that doesn’t stop her from wishing.

* * *

They completed the mission.

The mission was a success.

They completed the mission. They completed—

They—

“Nat,” Steve says, voice pitched low so the others don’t hear. He’s seated beside her in the quinjet, broad shoulders tilted to blow her from Rumlow’s view. “What would you like me to do?”

Slowly, her joints creaking in protest, she unfolds her arms. Unclenches her fists. There’s blood on her palms but the cuts already healed. She moves her right hand toward him. Steve takes it gently between both of his own. His fingers are warm against her skin.

She takes the time to relax each of her muscles as much as she can and allows her body to list to the right. She is a glacier, a continent on a collision course with another. Steve lets her come to him; he doesn’t rush her, just holds himself steady and waits for her to finish her journey.

She is lucky to call him her friend.

The quinjet lands. The hatch in the back opens; Rumlow and his agents file out without disturbing Captain America and the Widow.

“Can you stand?” Steve asks. His voice is still soft, though there’s no one around to hear him now.

She stands. Steve still holds her hand, firm enough to let her feel grounded but not trapping her.

“Natasha,” Steve says. She aches down to her bones; she turns her head to look at him. There are lines beneath his eyes, the only sign of how long they’ve been without sleep. “Can I give you a ride home?”

She nods, because she knows it would be a terrible idea to drive after such a bad trigger.

She shudders.

Steve leads her out of the quinjet. She shivers in the cold air but at least it has been a snowless winter so far. It’s a long trip to the parking garage but they make it. They pass her Stingray and she pats it twice on the hood; it’ll have to wait here for her. When they reach his bike, Steve hands her the only helmet and she doesn’t argue. He asks, “Where would you like to go?”

“Home,” she says.

Steve straddles the bike and waits for her to tuck herself in behind him, helmet strap secure under her chin. The bike starts with a dull roar, muffled by the helmet’s padding.

He takes her home.

*

Liho is waiting in the entryway when she unlocks the door and pushes it open.

Steve, two steps behind her, says, “You have a cat,” and it’s not a question but it sounds like he almost meant it to be.

Nat closes the door behind him. Liho darts forward and begins to rub against the ridges of her boots.

“Yes,” she says. Has she not mentioned him to Steve before? “His name is Liho.”

Steve stoops to his knees, hunching his shoulders and holding out a hand. Liho arches his back, fur bristling. Steve waits patiently until Liho begins to inch forward. Nat stares down at the both of them, bemused.

Steve holds his fingers steady and Liho sniffs them for a moment.

Quick as a snake, Liho bites Steve’s fingertips.

“ _Ow_ ,” Steve says, but he doesn’t flinch. He glances up at Nat, still hunched over on the ground, the corner of his mouth pulled up in a wry grin. “You could’ve given me a heads up.”

Nat doesn’t fight the smile that elicits.

“What’s the fun in that?” she asks.

* * *

It becomes something of a ritual. When missions go poorly they go home to Nat’s apartment so she can feed Liho. Thankfully, because they are good at their jobs, missions don’t go poorly very often. But this also means that soon it’s not just after the bad missions, but the good ones too, and then before she knows it, Steve is more or less a permanent fixture in her apartment.

They spend the winter curled up on the couch, binging Netflix shows, and alternating who cooks. Neither of them are particularly good at it, and Nat finds herself buying more food than she ever has in her life, but she doesn’t mind.

The first time they go to Steve’s apartment after a mission, instead of her own, they run into his neighbor in the hallway.

They’re coming up the stairs, trailing mud behind them because D.C. is just as awful in the spring as she remembers. Steve’s shield is in a protective carrying case that does nothing to disguise what it is and Nat’s entire body aches from being dropped off a thirty foot building.

She has been trying to grow her hair out, but with the way it’s tangled and sticking to her face, she’s starting to think it was a bad idea. Sure, once it’s longer she’ll be able to pull it back more effectively. But if she just cuts it all off again—like she’d worn it in the 90s, except maybe in a better style because the 90s had been a bad decade for hair—it will solve that problem much more quickly.

Nat is debating the options silently when she hears a door open and close in the hallway above them. She reaches for her weapon out of habit.

“Oh,” Steve says, looking over his shoulder at her. “That’s probably just Kate. My neighbor.”

Steve’s neighbor “Kate,” as it turns out, is Agent Sharon Carter of SHIELD Special Services.

They take one look at each other and freeze right there in the hallway.

Nat feels sort of stupid. She never considered the fact that SHIELD would have someone else watching Steve. Even if it is, ostensibly, for his own protection.

“Kate,” Steve says, glancing between the two of them. The bastard is too intelligent for his own good sometimes. “This is Natasha, my coworker. Natasha, this is Kate.”

“Kate” is carrying a laundry basket, so they don’t shake hands, but Natasha nods politely and even manages a smile. Agent Carter smiles back and continues down to one of the lower floors. Natasha wonders if she’s actually going to wash those clothes.

Steve glances once more at Carter’s retreating back, then motions with his head for Nat to follow him. He unlocks his front door and steps to the side to allow Nat to walk through first.

The apartment is nice. There are some free-standing bookshelves that separate the living room from the kitchen, and it actually looks like Steve has a respectable collection of books and records. There’s a record player in the corner of the living room. Steve drops his shield by the bookcase and steps into the kitchen.

There’s more stuff, more clutter, but this apartment is just as impersonal as her own. It makes her feel a little better.

“Beer?” Steve asks, voice muffled due to the fact that his head is most of the way into the refrigerator.

Nat hadn’t pegged him for a beer person, even if she didn’t consider the fact that he can’t get drunk.

She can’t either, but she still says, “Sure.”

Steve pulls out two bottles, pops the caps off with his bare hands. She knows they aren’t the kind that are meant to twist off.

“So,” Steve says, drifting toward the couch. Nat trails in his wake. She doesn’t like the tone of that _so._ “That was an odd reaction to Kate.”

She wishes she could tell him who Kate really is. She hasn’t—she’s gone against her orders before, even SHIELD orders, so it isn’t that. It’s the fact that Nat herself hadn’t known, and she still isn’t sure what Carter is doing here. It’s the fact that she doesn’t want to have to be the one that breaks the news to him. She knows he’s figured out that part of her assignment is to watch him. Hell, he’s probably figured out that SHIELD has bugged his apartment; standard procedure, but no less invasive for the regulation behind.

If he hasn’t figured out Sharon Carter, she doesn’t want to be the one to break it to him.

“She reminded me of a woman I went on a date with, once,” Nat says, and it’s mostly accurate. “Clint set us up, thought we might have a lot in common. Wasn’t expecting Kate to look similar, that’s all.”

Steve squints at her. Not suspicious, exactly, and certainly not disgusted. Just considering.

The truth is that Clint _had_ set Nat and Sharon Carter up on a blind date, back when they were both new agents and he was worried she didn’t get out of the house enough. They went on one formal date, had lots of incredible sex, and ate a lot of takeout on Sharon’s couch. But in their line of work, long term, serious relationships don’t happen very often, and they usually don’t end happily. Clint and Laura are the exception, rather than the rule.

It had been a cordial break up. Nat hasn’t thought about Sharon Carter in several years, truth be told.

That doesn’t mean she was expecting to see her staking out Nat’s new partner. She wonders if all the time he spends in her apartment is interfering with Carter’s ability to do her job, and feels an irrational sense of satisfaction at the thought. Then she considers the possibility that SHIELD has someone watching her apartment, too, to make up for it. It's a much less pleasing thought. She resolves to do another sweep of the building when she goes back.

“Hmm,” is all Steve says. He contemplates his beer bottle, the condensation slipping down the glass. “I would have thought you and Clint–?”

He wouldn’t be the first. She wishes she could tell him about Clint’s family, Nat’s family. She thinks Steve and Laura would get along well. Lila would love him and Cooper would be shy at first but would warm up after an hour or so.

“No,” she says. “Clint—” is like a brother; is her best friend; is her family. She saved herself but Clint found her after the fact. He gave her a meaningful option. She doesn’t know how to finish that sentence in a way Steve will want to hear.

Steve doesn’t press. He just swipes his thumb along the neck of his bottle and watches the way the water droplets move.

Nat takes a sip of her beer and turns on the TV, tucked in the corner of the couch opposite the record player. They bicker over shows until their half-full beers go warm and the subject of neighbors is long forgotten. Steve steals the remote when she’s distracted and all the other concerns drop out of her mind as she plots her revenge.

It’s nice.

She doesn’t think it can last.

* * *

Natasha wakes up one morning in May and realizes she’s been in D.C., working with Steve, for nearly a year.

Actually, first, she just wakes up.

Her neck is sore from sleeping in a weird position for too long and her lower back aches. She groans, stretches, and then realizes she’s still on the couch, which would explain the discomfort.

Nat opens her eyes and sure enough, she’s curled up sideways on the couch, facing Steve at the other end. He’s still asleep, head tilted back and feet propped up on the coffee table. She’s somewhat surprised he isn’t snoring with the way his mouth hangs open.

She sits up straight. The blanket that was tucked around her shoulders falls and pools around her hips. Nat stares down at it, surprised, and then looks back at Steve. He makes a small snuffling sound in his sleep.

Nat hates how stupidly fond she feels when he does that.

The TV screen is black—either turned off by Steve at some point or timed out on its own—and Nat tries to remember what they had been watching. Parks and Rec, maybe.

She’s tired; her whole body drags with the weight of it. Their last mission, to Boston, was the kind that’s boring and yet doesn’t allow you to sleep for days. They came back to her apartment after debriefing with Hill, pulled up Netflix on the TV, and… fell asleep, as far as she can tell.

She glances back down at the blanket. It’s her favorite because it’s extra fluffy and long enough that she could wrap it around herself twice, if she wanted to. Steve remembered that it was her favorite because that’s just the type of person that Steve is.

That’s when she realizes it: they’ve been working together for a year now.

It shouldn’t be that shocking; Nat has worked with other agents for longer periods of time in the past—Clint was her partner for years before he semi-retired, and she’s gone on dozens of missions with Hill since Nat’s first official SHIELD assignment, when Hill was told to babysit. And it’s not like this is the first time she’s stayed in one city for a year.

But it still feels—different. Important.

Steve doesn’t jolt himself out of sleep, or drift slowly out of his dreams. It’s simply that one moment he’s asleep, and the next he’s awake, blinking slowly in the early morning light. He turns to look at her and smiles.

Oh.

*

She doesn’t kiss him then, though she considers it.

Nat waits. The last thing she wants is to fall into a relationship that will ruin their ability to partner in the field, or to start something that feels casual on her end but is entirely serious from Steve’s perspective.

So she watches. Tries to take a step back from their interactions, and in doing so realizes just how comfortable she’s gotten around Steve in the last thirteen months.

Over and over, she catches a fondness in his gaze that hadn’t been there before. But it’s not longing or anguish or overwhelming desire. Just a simple fondness for a friendship they’ve both worked hard for.

So she kisses him before a mission.

They’re on the quinjet, traveling over the Atlantic Ocean on their way to some tiny island off the coast of Greenland. It’s just her and Steve and the pilot. Just before they reach the dropzone, Nat glances over at Steve and asks, “Hey Rogers, can I try something?”

He adjusts the shield where it sits on his left arm and says, “Sure, what is it?”

Nat leans over and gives him a simple open-mouth kiss. When she pulls away he blinks at her.

“What was that for?” he asks.

Nat smirks, just as the pilot tells them they’re ready to jump.

“I just felt like it,” she tells him, and adjusts her parachute one last time.

*

The Greenland missions ends up being three days of utter ridiculousness, and by the time they touch down in D.C. they’re both too tired to address the kiss.

It hangs over Natasha’s head as she goes home, alone. She wonders if she miscalculated.

*

The next afternoon, there’s a knock at the door.

She checks the peephole to confirm that it’s Steve and swings the door open. Nat sticks her leg out to one side to stop Liho from darting out into the hallway. She says, “Hey.”

Steve holds up a bag from the deli down the street.

“I figured,” he starts, then clears his throat and pauses for just long enough that she knows he’s struggling to find the proper words. “Lunch?”

Nat moves out of the way, picking up Liho as she goes, to let Steve into the apartment. Lunch turns out to be their favorite sandwiches and cookies from the bakery that’s next to the deli. They sit at her small kitchen table and, between bites, bitch about the last mission.

When she’s about halfway through her sandwich and Steve is almost done with his, she sighs and sets the remainder of her sandwich down. Steve freezes and looks at her from the corner of his eye, cheeks rounded from the bite he just took.

“I wanted to apologize if I made you uncomfortable when I kissed you,” she says. Steve chews a little faster. Swallows. “I thought it was a potentially good idea, but I can understand if it wasn’t.”

Steve reaches for his glass of water and takes a long sip. After that, he says, “Your timing could use a little work, but it didn’t make me uncomfortable.”

Liho jumps up into her lap and curls up in a ball. She pets him, gently. He purrs in response.

“Would it bother you if we added sex to our partnership?” she asks. To his credit, Steve doesn’t react to the blunt question. He just pops the last bit of his sandwich into his mouth and thinks while he chews, eyes fixed on some point in the distance.

Finally, he just shrugs. “I guess it would depend. What are we talking about here?”

“Casual?” Nat suggests. Steve breaks off a bit of a cookie, because he’s the type of person with the will power to wait until he’s done with his meal to start on dessert. “Friends with benefits?” Steve raises an eyebrow at that, so Nat amends, “Coworkers turned friends, with benefits?”

That makes him laugh.

“Yeah, sure.” He eats more of the cookie. “I don’t think I would mind that.”

She laughs at him, because that’s a stupid way to phrase it, and he grins, pleased. Nat throws a bit of napkin at him.

*

They don’t sleep together then, because their phones both beep with incoming messages from Hill, recalling them to the Triskelion for debriefing.  And then it’s off to Paris for a seventeen day undercover op as a married couple; they trade plenty of kisses in public, where anyone—especially the mark—can see them. But that’s just as much a part of the job as anything else.

They don’t sleep together in Paris, because there’s too much to keep track of, too many theories about what Ambassador Jiang is trying to achieve, and because sex isn’t part of the mission. Natasha has had to blur that line too many times in the past, and she never will again, if she can help it.

But after:

They take a commercial flight back to D.C. Nat falls asleep with her head on Steve’s shoulder and when she wakes up their hands are intertwined. As they disembark the plane, Nat asks, “My place tonight?”

“Sure,” Steve says.

They have to wait at the baggage claim, because the shield isn’t allowed as a carry on. Nat pats her Stingray on the hood before climbing in the driver’s seat. They drive to her apartment, and they don’t sleep together then, because Liho pastes himself to Nat’s side the moment she walks in through the door and refuses to be separated for even a moment.

Having sex with a cat for an audience is not on her list of things to do for the day, so instead Steve pulls up Netflix and starts the next episode of Parks and Rec.

*

She wakes up on the couch. More specifically, she wakes up draped across Steve’s chest while he sleeps on the couch, though she isn’t sure how she migrated here from where she was last night. Nat props herself up and stares down at him.

Steve wakes up a few minutes later, blinking and looking up at her.

“Good morning,” Nat says. He _hmm_ s in response and she can feel it in her chest. His hand comes up to rest on her lower back, his pinky dipping just under the top of her panties.

Nat quirks an eyebrow. “Oh, so that’s how it is.”

Steve smirks up at her, and proves that’s exactly how it is.

* * *

For his birthday that year, Steve is cordially invited to a function that involves him dressing up in his _traditional_ Captain America suit to go meet with the type of rich assholes that don’t know Steve Rogers was the chronically ill son of immigrants. It’s less of an invitation than an order, so he doesn’t manage to weasel his way out of it.

Nat lounges on his bed as he pulls on the tights and the shorts.

“Wow,” she says, propped up on one elbow so she can watch him. “I’m really digging the vintage look.”

“Yes, I know, very funny,” Steve responds, his head stuck in the shirt and he tries to locate the arms through feeling alone.

He kisses her softly before he leaves. She’s most of the way to asleep by the time he returns later that night, still curled up in his bed. When she feels the mattress dip she scooches over to give him room.

Steve kisses her hairline, whispers, “Goodnight, Nat.”

He lays down beside her and she presses herself against his side.

“Night, Steve,” she murmurs. “Happy birthday.”

* * *

She knows Steve has a slightly larger than average collection of tattoos; she’s seen some of them when they’re at the gym or when they’re fucking in one of their apartments, but she doesn’t manage to see all of them until one lazy weekend in September.

They’re sprawled together in his bed, sheets pulled up to their waists as a compromise because Nat always wants more blankets and Steve would go without, if he thought he could get away with it. Nat is basking in the post-coital glow when Steve asks, “Do you have any marks?”

She props herself up on an elbow, head supported by her hand, so she can look at him. Steve reaches up and runs his fingers through her hair. It’s noticeably longer now, and Nat finds she likes the length. She also likes the minor obsession Steve seems to be developing.

Nat shrugs as best she can with one shoulder. “Just my own.”

“Does that bother you?”

Nat closes her eyes as his hand makes its way to her scalp and starts playing with her hair in earnest. She places her free hand on his abdomen.

“Not really,” she tells him. She opens her eyes and meets his gaze. “Do you like having a lot of them?”

He huffs out a laugh. “I’m not sure that they count as a lot, but yeah. I do.”

She peers down at him. There’s fondness in his expression again, but it’s also tinted with nostalgia.

“Tell me about them?” she asks, and so he does.

The decorative dagger running down the length of his sternum is from Peggy Carter. It’s mainly black, still, with gleaming colors on the hilt.. He tells her the story of having to take off his shirt before he received the serum while Peggy was still in the room, knowing full well she was going to see the dagger the size of his forearm branded across his chest. She giggles into her fist, picturing Steve before the serum, trying to act cool in front of his crush who _knew_ he was in love with her.

“Yeah,” he says wryly as she continues to laugh. “Not my best moment.”

“I’m sorry, Steve,” she gasps. “It’s so _cute._ ”

He smiles and gives a section of her hair a slight tug. She swats at him but calms down.

The circle around his belly button is actually a single line folding in over itself to form waves. It’s still relatively dark.

“Bucky,” he admits, as she traces it with a finger. “He and I—we never managed to figure it out, in the end, but I loved him.”

She kisses him softly, and he lets her.

The others are more light hearted. One, on the underside of his left bicep, is a crescent moon, faded so much she needs Steve to point it out to her. He tells her he’s fairly certain it was from a girl named Golda who was in one of his art classes. The last major one is a tall candle on the back of his knee, from the grocer’s apprentice who lived down the street from Steve when they were in their teens. The outline of a delicate broach on the outside of his thigh that he thinks might be from Aliya, the girl who gave him his tour of the Triskelion. Others, too, maybe half a dozen in total, that faded nearly as soon as they appeared, when Steve fell in love with someone he met on the street, during those brief seconds when you see a kind stranger and feel like anything is possible.

It’s overwhelming, almost.

Nat stares at the dagger, contemplating, and Steve lets her.

“You have a lot of love to give,” she says finally. It’s not a question. “Does it bother you?”

“No,” he says simply. He doesn’t even stop to consider it. She wonders what that’s like, to be so certain in your vulnerability.

She leans down and kisses him again. He cups her jaw with his hand. She works on just enjoying the fact that she gets to spend this time with him now.

Talk about the marks makes her nervous. She’s happy when he lets her transition the conversation into something that requires quite a bit less talking.

* * *

They’ve always been casual: kisses traded between sparring matches and nights spent eating takeout on Nat’s couch and sex after missions when they have the energy.

That’s why Nat has never balked at suggesting other people Steve should date. They’re casual, somewhere between friends and regular lovers, and anyway, it’s fun to try and figure out what Steve’s type is. She likes watching the way his mouth quirks to one side or his eyebrow ticks upward when she comes up with a new suggestion. Likes the way he never shuts her down, only deflects again and again. It tells her she’s not entirely wrong.

They’re casual, and that’s why she never bothers to check for Steve’s mark on her skin. It’s distinctive enough—vibrant colors bleeding across his ankle like ink that’s been dropped into water and left to unfurl—that she could never miss it.

And anyway. They’re casual.

* * *

Nat wakes up to the bright light of an early winter morning and she’s cold. She rolls over to face the other side of the bed, squinting because Steve left the curtains open last night. His lack of concern for safety is truly appalling at times.

He’s stretched out beside her, the pale skin of his torso on display because he must have kicked the covers down to the foot of the bed sometime in the night. It is, in her opinion, the absolute worst of all his habits.

Nat pushes herself into a sitting position and leans forward until she can grab the edge of the sheet. She pulls it back up over her body as she falls back onto the mattress. Steve frowns in his sleep, so Nat fusses with the sheet until it’s covering her but not touching him. She thinks at least half of the bottom has come untucked, but that’s easily fixed, later.

Reaching back, Nat grabs her phone from the bedside table and shoots off a text to Clint: _call tonight?_

She doesn’t wait for confirmation before she drops the phone and curls into Steve’s side because he, at least, is always warm. She presses her hand to his stomach. He turns toward her even in sleep, so that his nose is in her hair and an arm is around her waist. He’ll grump, once he wakes, about oversleeping and cutting into his jogging time. Nat doesn’t wake him.

It’s her birthday.  For once in her life, she thinks she’ll spend it in bed.

* * *

Steve has another formal event. Steve is complaining about that formal event.

“Why don’t you have to go to this?” he asks.

“Because,” Nat says from her spot on the bed, flipping to the next page of her book, “it’s bad for business if everyone knows what your spies look like. Captain America, on the other hand, is a beloved national hero.”

Out of sight, Steve grumbles to himself. He steps out of the bathroom, vest on but collar popped.

“I don’t understand why I have to wear a tuxedo,” he grumps, straightening his cuffs. “Have you seen my bowtie?”

Nat picks it up off the bedspread with the toes of her right foot and extends her leg toward him. She flips the page again. “It’s a New Years Eve party hosted by Tony Stark in the nation’s capital. Of course you need to wear a tux.”

“Ew, Nat,” he says, taking the bowtie. Before she can relax her leg he cups his fingers around her right ankle and presses a kiss to the curve of her skin. “You know Tony too. Why didn’t he invite you.”

“I told you: spy.” He’s still holding her ankle, his thumb caressing the smooth skin above her ankle bone. She glances up from her book. The expression on his face gives her pause. “Everything alright, Steve?”

“Yeah, of course,” he says, shaking his head. He lets go of her leg. “Sorry, I just really don’t want to go.”

Nat sets her book aside, pages down so that she doesn’t lose her spot. He fidgets with his bowtie but doesn’t actually manage to tie it. She pushes herself up and knee-walks over to the edge of the bed. “Come here.”

He comes to stand before her and lets her tie his bowtie.

“Here’s the deal,” she tells him, straightening it one last time, “You go, play nice with all the important people for an hour or two. Then you come back here, and we can watch the ball drop together.”

Steve puts his hands on her hips and leans toward her. Like this, with Nat kneeling on the bed, they’re almost the same height. Steve asks, “Does that mean I get a kiss at midnight?”

She gives him a kiss now, then says, “Only if you get back here on time. Now shoo.”

*

He makes it back for midnight.

* * *

Natasha visits the Barton farm in February for Laura’s fortieth birthday.

It’s a small celebration, for obvious reasons, with just the family, Natasha, and Maria in attendance when Laura blows out the candles on a cake that looks like its contains more fire and wax than actual cake. Clint teases his wife about getting old, so naturally Maria and Nat have to gang up and remind him that he’s closer to fifty at this point.

She spends much of the rest of the afternoon napping on the couch, Lila sprawled across her chest and Cooper in the big reclining chair, reading a book.

Nat only visits for the weekend, but she leaves for D.C. with a whole collection of new drawings from Lila and a little Lego person that Cooper put together to look like her.

When she gets home, the first thing Nat does is scoop Liho into her arms and nuzzle her face against his fur. He meows and bats his paw at the air to show her how annoyed he is, so she lets him go again.

The second thing she does is to pull the gifts from the kids out of her bag. She hangs them up on the fridge with little magnets she bought in a thrift store, years ago, and snaps a picture with her phone. She attaches it to a text for Clint.

_please tell lila i love her drawings so much i had to hang them up right away! they’ve replaced the ones she gave me last time!_

And then, once the message is sent, she gathers them all back up again and takes them into the bedroom. There’s a box with a four digit combination lock hidden in the back of her closet, and she pulls it out from under a pile of shoes. Unlocks it, places the drawing and the Lego person inside, and closes it again. The box goes back in the closet, and Natasha deletes the photo off of her phone.

SHIELD Agent Natasha Romanoff has no reason to know two young children both under the age of ten, especially when neither one of them legally exist.

She hates it, but for her family’s safety, she puts the box back into the closet.

* * *

She is the first person Steve calls.

“Nat,” he says, his voice strained and unnaturally soft. “It’s Fury.”

Nick is already in surgery by the time Natasha makes it to the hospital. She comes across Maria wandering one of the halls, looking lost and wild about the eyes. Steve collects them before Nat even thinks to call him.

Nick has been many things to her, in the decade she’s known him. She’s never considered the possibility of him dying, not even when she still did freelance work and she failed to kill her target before he got the tip of his knife in Nick’s eye.

She presses her forearms against her stomach so she isn’t sick.

Steve touches two fingers to the spot just above her elbow then wraps his hand around the joint, as gentle as ever. His anger over the _Lemurian Star_ is gone, or buried for now, banked ashes smoldering. It’s not the time for it and they both know it.

She’s glad he’s there with her.

*

He holds up the flashdrive. She doesn’t know when slipped it out of her pocket, how he found it without her knowing.

“What _is_ this, Natasha.”

She looks from his eyes to his mouth to his forearm. Every inch of him is restrained anger, down to the absolute stillness of his chest.

Natasha flicks her gaze from his hand to his eyes and back to the flashdrive. She doesn’t know how to play this. He knows her too well to be played at all.

Steve shifts his grip so that just his thumb and first finger hold the drive, the rest of his fingers curled tightly against his palm. And there—

There, on the side of his pointer finger that is usually hidden against his middle finger, she sees a tattoo, small but inked in the blackest black. Dark in a way that’s impossible to achieve with normal ink.

It’s a single dandelion seed.

Natasha tilts her chin back and meets Steve’s gaze.

“I only act like I know everything, Rogers,” she says. And it’s more true than he thinks.

*

The bogie.

Steve’s body over hers—rocks breaking across his back. Mountains.

Smoke in her lungs; she chokes on the weight of it.

Steve’s voice: “Natasha!”

*

The Soldier pursues her.

Natasha weaves through abandoned cars, tries to avoid the civilians scattered across the street. The Soldier is indiscriminate in his aim; she won’t have more of them die. That didn’t used to be the case but the Americans have not been kind to their asset. They have not known how to utilize him to his full potential. Not known or not cared.

“Soldat!” she barks. < Stop! >

He pulls up short, hand halfway to the gun strapped to his thigh. His eyes—she shot at his goggles—are wide and wild, tinged red around the edges.

< Little spider, > he says, and his voice is a rockslide though it is muffled by the muzzle.

She didn’t think he would remember her.

The Soldier reaches for the gun.

Natasha runs.

*

Sam is the one who finds him on the river bank.

Nat’s heart is in her throat until she receives confirmation from Sam. Her fingers tremble as she attempts to type out a reply to his text. She—

She has to sit down right in the middle of the floor, knees drawn up so she can rest her forehead on them. She squeezes her eyes closed and breathes. And breathes. And breathes.

There is something ugly living in her chest and it claws at her ribcage. She doesn’t—

She places a hand flat against the floor and holds it there until she is still again.

It takes a long time.

* * *

After, when Steve is lying in a hospital bed with his face barely recognizable as a living thing, she only visits him once. The sight of him, motionless and pale against the white sheets, makes her breath catch. Sam is in the only chair and he doesn’t comment when she takes that as an invitation to sit on the bed by Steve’s feet. She can’t look at his face so she looks at Sam.

“How is he?” she asks.

Sam tells her about the terrible quality of hospital coffee. What lengths the medical personnel have to go to in order to sedate Steve long enough for him to heal. The injuries he suffered in the first place; she knew some of them, but the entire list leaves a sour taste in her mouth.

< Fuck, > she says to herself, maybe in Russian. She isn’t sure. Nat squeezes her eyes shut, presses the heels of her palms into her eyelids. It feels like something is trying to crawl its way out of her throat. < Fuck. >

Sam doesn’t say anything. She pulls her hands away and glances at him. His face isn’t blank, but it doesn’t hold any judgement either.

Nat has only known this man for a handful of days, and yet it feels as though she’s known him her whole life. It would make her uneasy, normally, but she’s already so off balanced by being here and seeing Steve genuinely injured, that instead of feeling unsteady she’s comforted by it.

He must be an easy man to love. She thinks there are probably many people in the world with his tattoo on their skin, and they’re probably proud of it. Maybe they’re happy to simply have evidence that they’ve loved such a remarkable person, been so touched by his presence in their lives that it left a permanent mark on them. She wonders how many of their tattoos Sam bears in return.

As if he’s reading her mind, Sam nods at Steve’s prone form and says, “The doctor said he’s got quite a collection of tattoos.”

Nat gives a bleak laugh and darts her gaze toward Steve’s face.

“Yes,” she says, because there’s no point in denying that she knows it. “I think he has five major ones, plus the others that have faded.”

Sam _hmm_ s and stares at Steve. Nat stares at him. She hears someone pass the door to the room, talking softly. There’s no response, so they must be on the phone. They’re gone a few seconds later. Sam asks, “Is one of them… you know?”

“Yeah. There’s one on his stomach that’s from Barnes.”

Sam rubs his face, and she can hear the rasp of his stubble against the skin of his palm from here.

“Do you think–?”

There was a time when her life was measured in missions completed, rather than days. The Widow passed the Soldat by, two ghosts, no—two weapons in the hands of the powerful.

She remembers the scars on his ankle, their own type of manacle.

It takes a moment to organize the words properly in her mind. Someone else passes by the closed door while she’s thinking, footsteps heavy and certain on the linoleum. Security, maybe.

“If Bucky had Steve’s tattoo,” she says, in the end, “it was removed a long time ago. The Soldier was always different than the rest of us. There were different rules.” She drops her gaze to her lap and flexes her toes in her boots. Listens to the sound of Steve’s wheezing, labored breathing. “I guess that makes sense in hindsight, since he was a person, before.”

It’s more than she wanted to say—far more, and far too revealing, especially to someone like Sam, who’s surely been trained to pick up on such language.

Sam doesn’t comment. She thinks, in another life, she could’ve been one of those people that was proud to have his tattoo.

When she goes to leave, he stands. He doesn’t try to hug her. Nat lets him squeeze her shoulder.

“You good?” he asks. Nat nods. Doesn’t look at Steve’s face, hovering in the corner of her vision. “Okay. You’re heading out?”

“Yes.” She reaches up and tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. Keeps her eyes trained on Sam’s face. “Someone has to attend those Senate hearings.”

Sam holds her gaze. “And after?”

Nat jerks her head in Steve’s direction. “He’s going to want to go after the Soldier. He’ll need information.”

“Okay,” Sam says.

Steve will be safe. He’ll wake soon, and once he’s awake, he can defend himself. She has no reason to worry.

Nat doesn’t look at him. She gives Sam a final smile, and turns to leave.

*

She attends briefings and weathers accusations without flinching; to flinch, in another life, was to die.

She boards a plane to Kiev and, in an abandoned warehouse outside of a dying neighborhood, she fights Yelena, her once-sister, to a standstill. Blood and sweat drip from their skin by the end of it. Half a century later and they are still, at their core, what the Red Room made them into: two girls, talented, cunning, desperate. Yelena’s hair is blonde now, but seeing her is still like staring into a mirror, one that has warped and cracked with time but is still clear.

< Trouble is coming, > Yelena tells her, Russian tumbling from her tongue like a waterfall. She did not try to kill Natasha, not truly, which means she’s as free as she can make herself. < Your shield may have broken, but Hydra will only continue to grow more heads. >

< I know. > Natasha does not flinch because she cannot. < That’s why you must take me to the vault. >

Yelena does not flinch. She does not try to speak the trigger words, because she knows Natasha broke her programming two decades ago and because Natasha’s triggers are Yelena’s own. Natasha thinks of mirrors.

< No. >

< Yes. > Natasha’s hair sticks to her face. She holds her hands still by her sides. < I need to know more about how they made the Soldier. >

Yelena scoffs. < The Soldier is dead. >

Natasha shakes her head and steps forward. Yelena does not flinch. She says, < He is lost, but not dead. >

Yelena considers her. Natasha can see her pulse fluttering under the delicate skin of her neck, revealing just how much the fight took out of her.

She was wrong, before. Yelena’s hair is not just blonde: there’s silver, bright and sharp, threaded throughout, barely distinguishable in the low light but undeniably there.

The products of the Red Room did not all receive the same serum.

< For the Soldier, > Yelena says, < I will take you to the vault. >

Natasha returns to DC just as Steve is officially cleared by the hospital to do all the things Sam tells her he’s been doing anyway.

Nick turns into just one more of countless ghost stories. Nat hands over the file Yelena allowed her to take, and then she disappears before Steve can try to convince her to stay.

* * *

She doesn’t lie when she tells Steve and Sam she blew all her covers in the data dump. But while they might be imagining Natasha curled up in a defunct, cobwebbed Soviet bunker, in reality, Nat goes home.

Gravel crunches under her tires as she drives the mile from the road to the front gate, first past trees taller than the telephone poles and then cleared, fenced land. She has to get out of the car—one she _borrowed_ from the Triskelion parking garage, after ensuring that it couldn’t be tracked—to open the seven digit combination padlock.

Liho, from his carrier in the backseat, meows pitifully.

“Shh, baby,” she tells him. “We’re nearly there.”

The grass in the front fields is overgrown and the steps on the front porch still need fixing. Nat skips the middle one, because it’s always been the least sturdy. She knocks on the doorframe and waits.

The screen door swings open.

“Auntie Nat!” Cooper yells.

“Hey bud,” she says, scooping him up even though he’s getting too big for Clint to lift easily. She squints at his smile. “Did you lose a tooth?”

“I did!”

Nat carries him into the house as he chatters away about everything that’s happened in the months since she last visited. Lila’s birthday party was butterfly themed. Dad started fixing the dining room but Mom doesn’t think he’s actually going to finish it. Lila, he informs her with the seriousness of a young child, is napping and Cooper has been tasked with keeping an eye on her.

“Well,” Nat tells him, kissing his forehead. “I would hate to keep you from you mission.”

She puts him down and he gives her a clumsy salute before turning to run back up the stairs. As he reaches the top he says, “Mom’s in the barn!”

Nat stares after him, smile slipping from her face. She takes a deep breath.

The barn is fifty meters from the house, but Nat can hear Laura’s curses before she’s halfway there. One of the big red doors is open, and Nat finds Laura hunched over, trying to pick up one of their mare’s hooves. There’s a hoof pick in her right hand and her left is wrapped around the mare’s pastern.

“Come on, you stubborn jackass.” The mare snorts. Laura leans into the mare’s shoulder, trying to shift her weight. “That’s right, I called you a jackass, you old nag. Just let me see the _fucking_ —”

“Laura?” Nat asks.

Laura straightens. Pushes some of her dark hair away from her face.

“Natasha,” she says, breathless. Her eyes are wide. “Thank god you’re okay.”

Nat has always liked hugging Laura and this time is no different. But she can also feel the way Laura’s fingers tremble against her back, the way her breaths are shaky. She hugs Laura tighter. They’re the same height but right now Nat wishes she was bigger, if only so that she could give Laura a better hug.

Laura turns her face into Nat’s neck. Nat feels warm tears on her skin, but she doesn’t move. The mare whickers softly behind them.

“Have you heard from Clint at all?”

“No,” Nat says. She tries, desperately, to remember if she had seen any mention of his aliases in the data dump, but there were so many files and she’d had so little time. “Is he in the field?”

Nat feels Laura nod.

Shit. Shit shit goddamn _shit._

“He’s gonna be okay,” she says. And then she says it again, and Laura inhales sharply, trying not to sob.

*

They wait together.

Nat stays and helps on the farm; the three horses, two children, and countless chickens aren’t too much for Laura to handle on her own—she’d never have managed so many years of Clint going out on missions otherwise—but still, she stays. It helps that she needs to lay low anyway, now that her own covers have been blown.

The kids are delighted to have Nat there for more than a day or two and even more excited at the presence of Liho, though he hides for the first three days; they demand she assist them with crafts, and homework, and schemes in their continuous war against one another. Nat helps glue macaroni to paper and they learn about the types of volcanoes together, but she bows out of the sibling rivalry. She remembers her own rivalry with the girls who might have been her sisters in a different life, and it makes her nauseous, thinking of Cooper and Lila treating each other in a similar way.

Every night, after the kids are tucked away in bed, Nat and Laura huddle together at the kitchen table, hands wrapped around mugs of hot cocoa. They don’t usually talk about Clint, or how he might be doing wherever he is, but it hangs over them like a threat all the same. Nat thinks she could find him if she accessed the SHIELD files she dumped. But there’s no way to guarantee someone isn’t tracking which files are accessed, and depending on who’s doing the tracking, that could bring the wrong type of attention down on Clint.

Plus, she doesn’t want to leave Laura and the kids here alone. She knows Laura can protect them nearly as well as Natasha herself, but in the aftermath of the Triskelion, she doesn’t want to risk anything.

After a month of this—relearning the constellations and kissing injuries better and hot cocoa in the dim light of the kitchen—Nat can almost forget why she’s there. No one’s contacted her, not even Sam or Steve, and no one has come after Clint’s family. Her family.

She and Laura are sitting side by side in the kitchen, taking sips of their drinks between plans for the next day.

Laura sighs. “We really need more school supplies, and we’re running low on feed for the chickens.”

Nat stirs the half melted marshmallows with a popsicle stick and takes a sip.

“I can go tomorrow,” she says. Laura makes a disapproving sound but Nat smiles wryly and continues before she can speak. “I’ll be fine. I’ve been doing this a long time.”

“I know,” Laura tells her. She stares into her mug, and Nat gives her a moment to gather her thoughts. Outside, it’s starting to rain. The quiet patter of raindrops on the roof is familiar and comforting. “I’m just scared.”

Nat stirs her cocoa again; it’s starting to go cold. She takes a moment for herself, because there’s an odd feeling in her chest—envy, maybe, at the easy way Laura admits that vulnerability. But, no, envy isn’t quite right. She doesn’t have the right words to describe it, so instead, she reaches over and covers Laura’s free hand with her own.

Laura looks up and gives Nat a tired smile that creases her face along well worn laugh lines. She flips her hand over and squeezes Nat’s fingers.

“I trust you,” Laura says, just as the rain picks up. She has to speak a little louder: “But you’re family. I can’t help but worry.”

Laura and Clint and the kids are her family too. She bumps their shoulders together.

They go to bed not long after that, Nat’s room sandwiched between Lila’s and Cooper’s. The rain continues through to the early hours of the morning, but it’s mostly gone by the time she wakes, an hour before Laura normally does the morning animal chores.

Nat has always liked the routine involved in taking care of the horses, so she ties her hair back and slips quietly out the side door to the barn. The horses are happy to see her, and while they eat their grain she lets the chickens out of their coop and feeds them too. Then the horses are turned out into the paddock—and she’s already here, so Nat cleans out the stalls as well. By the time she’s finished, the last of the lingering rain has disappeared, the sun has painted the fields golden, and Laura is in the kitchen, starting a pot of coffee.

The stairs creak under her boots as she makes her way back to the bedroom that’s been more or less hers for years now. It’s easy enough to change into clothes that don’t smell like a farm: Nat steps into a loose dress that she’d bought because it reminded her of something she’d seen on TV once and for that fact that it looked nothing like what she normally wears. Then it’s sandals on her feet—ones that strap tightly around the back of her heel so she can still run if she has to—and a blue scarf tied at the base of her skull to hide her distinctive hair.

Maybe she should dye it. Not blonde, it’s too distinctive in its own way, but maybe brown. She’ll have to think about it.

Laura is waiting with a hug and a thermos of coffee. Nat takes both gratefully. The car starts easily. It’s a twenty minute drive east to the nearest town, so she puts on a pair of overly large sunglasses and rolls the windows down.

She finishes the errands quickly and doesn’t linger in town; she hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary, but Nat still feels like someone has dropped an ice cube down the back of her shirt and it’s sliding down her spine. Knowing her covers are useless makes her feel more exposed than she ever has.

There’s an unfamiliar truck in the driveway. Nat parks the car far enough back that anyone in the house won’t be able to hear it. There’s a Widow bite gauntlet in the glove compartment. She fits it on her right hand, sticks her left hand into the open pocket in the dress. Pulls the gun from its holster.

Stupid. So stupid to leave them alone.

She clears the truck before moving on. She wants to go straight to the house, but there’s no telling who these people are.

The truck is probably from the nineties, at least. It legally can’t fit more than three people. Natasha knows at least six grown men in full tac gear could fit under a tarp in the bed. She sees evidence of one set of footprints. It doesn’t prove anything.

The front screen door squeaks, and the step. Natasha knows Laura left a window in the back office open last night, despite the rain. She gets there and climbs in through the window frame. Stops. Listens for sounds of a struggle.

Raised voices, in the direction of the living room, but no movement.

Nat eases the door open so the hinges don’t make a sound. Not for the first time, she curses whoever chose this creaky old farm house. They probably did it for this reason, so it was difficult for someone to enter the house undetected.

It makes her job harder, but she’s the Widow.

She recognizes Laura’s voice first. She’s trying to speak while crying. Cooper and Lila are yelling. There’s a man’s voice, low, indistinct.

She tells herself to breathe.

At the edge of the hallway, just around the corner from the living room, she pauses. Checks her gun. Laura is still crying, the kids laughing—

Laughing?

She blinks and tries to shed the Widow persona.

The man speaks again. She knows that voice.

Nat holsters the gun and deactivates the Widow’s bite. She turns the corner.

“Clint?”

He turns. Something in his right foot is broken, and his left shoulder’s been dislocated, but he’s still holding Lila. By the way he’s angling his body, he lost his left hearing aid somewhere in the field. She was right, Laura is crying, but she’s also smiling, one hand held tightly to her chest and the other pressed more gently against Clint’s back. Cooper is grinning up at his dad and clinging to his left leg.

He must have other injuries, ones he’s better able to hide, but that doesn’t matter right now.

He’s home.

“Tasha,” Clint says.

Nat smiles, and steps forward for a hug.

* * *

Nat finds herself with a free afternoon not long after Clint returns. Restless, she pulls on sturdy boots and starts across the back fields toward the treeline in the distance. The tall grass brushes against her bare calves and a honeybee circles her head once, twice, confused by the color of her hair.

She needs to leave.

It’s been long enough that the initial chaos will have died down. She loves it here, isolated and surrounded on all sides by open land, but there are things she needs to do.

For twenty years, ever since she destabilized the foundations of the Red Room, she has operated under the assumption that she was the last remaining graduate of the Widow program.

But then there was Irina in Florida and, more recently, Yelena in Kiev. She has always heard whispers of free operatives with ties to Russia, but she had thought they were isolated incidents, or exaggerations. Not truth wrapped in cobwebs.

Natalia was the first, arguably the best. But she is not the last.

When she gets back to the house, Clint and Laura don’t argue when she says she’s leaving. They agree to take care of Liho for her, while she’s traveling. Cooper won’t talk and Lila keeps crying, and it breaks her heart to leave, but she has to.

She has to.

Her sisters are waiting.

*

Officially, Natalia Alianovna Romanova did not exist before 1994.

The Widow destabilized the Red Room in her escape, but she did not look back. She did not know if she could trust anyone. Yelena had been dead for a decade, maybe two. Irina, Galina, Olga, any of the older graduates—all dead, or, if they had escaped, gone for so long that the Widow could not trace them.

The only men she did not fear were the ones she had killed, because they could not cause any harm that way.

Some of the girls, she knew, had escaped. Masha. Alena. Maybe Dinara. Others, probably, that had come and gone while she was asleep in storage. Girls in the middle of their class—intelligent enough to learn the skills, slow enough that they were not watched to the same extent that the top of the class was, cunning enough to plan and hide it from the handlers—who slipped away during missions, or picked the locks when they were cuffed to their beds at night. Luba hadn’t been able to pick the lock, but she had stashed a knife between the mattress and the frame, so she cut off her own hand instead. The Soldat had been sent to retrieve her.

Natalia had thought she was dead. They all had.

Generations of girls, dead or lost. More still, killed at the Widow’s own hands. And that last class, the class of twenty-eight—she hadn’t gone back for them.

That was a mistake.

She’s going to fix it.

*

Her first destination is St. Petersburg, because she knows Yelena will not welcome her back with open arms, no matter how many questions she has. And the rumors always seem to originate in St. Petersburg. The flight is long and cramped, but she makes an effort to look out the window during the last leg of it. She wants to see this place that continues to credit itself with her creation.

Natasha plays the tourist, visiting the places with historic meaning: museums, the palaces, some of the oldest and grandest churches. She doesn’t pray, but she is thankful to be here, rather than Moscow. It seems none of the graduates want to return to the home of the Bolshoi Ballet.

And between the tourist attractions, she stops in back alleys and out of the way cafes, places with personal significance. Places she remembers from missions or the handful of moments she had managed to steal for herself before or after assignments.

She makes no effort to hide her hair, or its distinctive color. It’s a beacon, a signal to anyone who knows to look.

Zoya finds her during her third week in the city.

Natasha steps into a small restaurant. Once the server seats her, she orders borscht soup and leans back in her chair. The wooden tabletop is pitted and scratched; Natasha picks at one divot with her nail.

Someone sits down across from her.

Natasha waits two beats of her heart before she looks up.

The woman seated opposite Natasha appears to be in her mid-forties; her dark skin is wrinkled at the corners of her eyes and there is more silver than black in her hair, but she is still in the prime of her life.

< Widow, > the woman says. Her red lipstick is impeccable.

< Sister, > Natasha replies.

That makes the woman smile. It’s sardonic—sharp and mean and barely there.

< You search for the Soldier. >

Natasha has to consider that. _She_ isn’t searching for him, but Steve is, and she finds that she has a harder time separating her motives from Steve’s than she would have thought.

“I don’t,” she says, in the end. In English. “But a friend does. He means no harm.”

The woman tilts her head. Natasha knows she’s a graduate of the Red Room—there is deliberateness to each of her motions, the same certainty that was folded into each of their bones—but she doesn’t recognize her face. But faces are easily changed.

“My name is Zoya,” the woman says. Her English has a perfectly posh British accent. “I will not help you find him.”

Natasha shrugs, says, “I’m not looking for information on the Soldat. I will accept what is volunteered but I will not take more.” She meets Zoya’s gaze, face impassive. < I’m looking for our sisters. >

The server brings Natasha’s soup. Zoya waves him off when he asks if she’s interested in ordering. She watches Natasha bring a spoonful of blood-red borscht to her lips and blow on it.

< Why? >

Natasha eats her spoonful of soup. Collapses a piece of potato between the flat of her tongue and the roof of her mouth.

< I did not go back, > Natasha says. Zoya does not contradict her. < I was so deep in their web I did not know who survived. I would like to know now. >

Zoya tilts her head but is otherwise motionless. She does not have a single tell to give her thoughts away but Natasha does not need them.

She eats another bite of her soup.

< We didn’t tell you. > Zoya leans forward and props her chin up with her hand, her elbow braced on the tabletop. Compared to her elegance, the pose is incongruous.  Natasha keeps her grip on the spoon light. < You were different. The little spider. >

She swallows. Places the spoon back in the bowl and reaches for her glass of water, telegraphing each movement. Zoya watches her calmly. Natasha sips. When she doesn’t detect any foreign flavors, she takes a longer drink. Puts the glass down, doesn’t pick up the spoon again.

Natasha folds her hands in her lap, out of sight.

Zoya gives her a warm smile that is more reminiscent of Laura when dealing with her children than anything else. It’s odd, because Natasha is technically at least a decade older than this woman, but she does look like she could be Natasha’s mother.

“It wasn’t that we did not trust you, Natalia,” Zoya says. Natasha does not flinch at the name. Zoya pauses, considers her words. “But we knew that things were different for you. With the cryogenic sleep, Darina thought it would be hard for you to remember.”

“And if they ever decided to trigger the deeper programming...” Natasha starts, but she doesn’t bother to finish the sentence. Zoya knows what she means.

“Yes.”

Natasha picks up her spoon and eats more of the borscht. Zoya watches her.

< I hear there is a wolf spider infestation in Kuwait, these days, > Zoya says. She stands, straightens her skirt. < Perhaps you know of an exterminator. >

Zoya walks away but Natasha does not watch her go. She stares down at the tabletop, trying to remember the last time she had heard even a whisper about Niko Constantin. It’s been decades, at least. Just after the Red Room fell.

< Oh, and one more thing, > Zoya says, and her tone makes Natasha’s head snap up. She’s halfway across the room, turned back just enough that she can look at Natasha over her shoulder. Her face is carved from marble. < The Soldier does live. He seeks peace. Tell your captain to stand down. I do not care what his intentions are. >

She goes.

Natasha finishes her soup. There’s something in her chest that is collapsing in on itself. She doesn’t think peace is possible for people like them.

*

During her layover in Istanbul, Natasha buys a prepaid cell phone. She saves two numbers into its contact list and sends a text to each.

To Clint, she sends: _hows the bird watching?_

And to Maria Hill: _are you tearing your hair out over the remodeling project?_

Maria responds almost instantly, despite the time difference.

_You have no idea. We can’t even agree on the floor color._

Natasha slouches lower in her airport terminal chair and smiles. She shoots back _start simple. a good foundation is important_

Clint doesn’t get back to her until she’s waiting in line to board.

_bad_

The phone buzzes again before she finishes reading the one word.

_no birds :( they hvnt come home yt_

She sighs. Turns the phone off, rather than worry about responding yet.

*

The last time she was in Kuwait City, sometimes in the late 60s, she hadn’t had much time for sightseeing. Her first glimpse of it, this time, is given to her from inside the Kuwait International Airport. She stares at what she can see of the skyline, glittering in the midday sun and breathtakingly modern, and finds she’s excited to be here.

Or she would be, if she wasn’t tracking the Wolf Spider.

Natasha tugs at the sleeves her her abaya and then pushes her sunglasses further up her nose. Her travel visa is securely tucked into an inner pocket. She does not satisfy the urge to pat it and ensure it’s still there.

She likes the desert, even in July; prefers the dry, baking heat to the way humidity drapes itself over her like a heavy, unwanted arm across her shoulders. She likes the city, rooted in the shimmering desert and built out of mirrors.

Natasha visits Al Shaheed Park first; she spends the morning studying the art scattered throughout the park. She stops at the little café for lunch, and in the afternoon she tours the nearby museums.

Summer in a desert means the sunset takes hours and the light hangs in the air even longer, so it is still light out when she finds a relatively cheap hotel. Natasha spends the night sitting propped up against the headboard, listening for any hint of movement outside the door.

Her second day in Kuwait City, Natasha wakes before dawn, braids her hair back, and calls to arrange a tour of the Mirror House. The front of the building catches the light of the rising sun and throws it back at her. She pays for her ticket and Lidia Qattan, one of the house’s owners, gives her a tour. She introduces herself as Emma, an American tourist. Each mirror shard higher than Natasha’s hip bleeds and refracts red. Natasha can’t tell if it’s a reflection of her own hair or Lidia’s.

The bathroom is dizzying. Climbing the stairs is like falling into a dream, and she isn’t sure if it’s a pleasant experience or not. The rooms of artwork are less unsettling, and Natasha takes an extra moment to let her heartbeat slow.

At the end of the tour, she thanks her host in English rather than Kuwaiti Arabic and steps out into the morning heat. There’s not much of a crowd—most of the city’s inhabitants are either in their homes or at work—but Natasha still doesn’t pick up on her tail until he falls in line with her and links their arms together.

“Natashenka,” Niko says. His uncovered hair is as red as hers. “What a lovely surprise.”

She doesn’t attempt to pull her arm away. Unlike Karpov’s volunteers, who came later in the Red Room’s history, Niko is slim with compact muscles; his build is not unlike her own. But he doesn’t have to be large to dislocate her elbow.

“Niko,” she says in acknowledgement. They stroll down the sidewalk together, steps perfectly in sync.

Most of her memories of Niko consist of a young boy with red hair, kept separate from the other candidates. One of the first; an experiment. She trained with him a handful of times, and they were assigned a mission together once, where they pretended to be an orphaned brother and sister.

 _Too early_ , the handlers said later. He had been sent out in the field too early, before his training was complete. Others disagreed; they stuck to girls, after that.

They turn the corner. The sun beats down on their heads.

< Darling sister, > he says in perfectly accented Modern Standard Arabic. < I would have thought you’d be happier to see me after all these years. >

The last time she’d seen Niko he’d been unconscious. He’d gone berserk, attacked the target even though their mission was to extract information, not kill. She had knocked him out herself.

< I had assumed you were dead. > They pause, waiting to for a break in traffic to cross the street. < It seems I need to stop assuming such things. >

He barks out a harsh laugh, drawing the eyes of a nearby family. The youngest girl must be no more than three or four. Natasha gives them all an embarrassed, apologetic tourist smile before steering Niko away.

< Well, > Niko says, once he’s settled again. < I can’t say the same for you. You’ve made quite the name for yourself, darling sister. >

There’s a teen leaning against a storefront up ahead of them. Another group of teens watch him from across the street. Pickpockets, most likely, and doing it for fun rather than necessity. Showing off for each other.

The teen glances up and his expression is shocked when he finds Natasha already watching him. She shakes her head, hoping he’ll pick up on her warning. She tucks Niko’s arm closer to her side anyway, just to be safe. The teen lets them pass without trying anything.

“And,” he continues, in accented English, “apparently you’ve let your heart soften.”

Natasha shrugs.

“I’ve made my choices,” she says, allowing her accent to match his.

She isn’t sure what neighborhood they’re in now. She doesn’t know what game Niko is playing.

“Natasha.” Her chosen name sounds foreign on his tongue. “We all made choices. But none of us came back.”

She thinks of Yelena, haunting an abandoned warehouse in Kiev. Zoya and her impeccable lipstick, a guardian for the old city. The countless other graduates she has yet to find. She isn’t sure that’s true.

< Will you tell me a story? > she asks. Russian is still the easiest and hardest language for her to speak. The back of her neck is beginning to feel sunburnt.

< What of? >

< A grandfather, > she says, < with fingers your hair gets caught in. >

Niko stops walking. She turns her head to look at him but he won’t meet her eyes. Instead, he stares at the mosque they can see rising above the city ahead of them.

“The Soldat is tired,” he tells her, still staring forward. “Let him rest.”

“I plan to.”

Niko’s gaze darts toward her. “Does your friend?”

She thinks of Steve, proudly wearing the tattoos of good men and women like James Barnes and Peggy Carter, who never got the chance to love him properly. She thinks of late nights in her apartment and sex interrupted by Liho and a dandelion seed hidden on the side of his first finger.

“No,” she admits. “Probably not.”

Niko does not sigh. But his shoulder shifts against her like he started to sigh and swallowed it. They start walking once more. She recognizes this neighborhood, though it’s not the same area she traveled through last night.

“Masha is in Rabat.”

Natasha glances at him from the corner of her eye. Says, “She escaped before the Soldier came to Moscow.”

“She knows about the technology they used to wipe him.” Niko releases her arm. They’re standing before her hotel. “Might be worth the trip.”

She tugs the sleeve of her abaya down over her wrist.

“Thank you,” she tells him.

Niko pivots to face her and she realizes how young he looks. Younger than Steve, probably, and certainly younger than herself. It seems he received yet another version of the serum.

“Good luck, Natashenka,” he says. “Masha is still mad about the time you killed her target first.”

A piece of hair has come loose from her braid. Natasha reaches up to tuck it behind her ear as she watches him walk away.

If Masha is still mad, she’s going to need more than luck.

*

During a five hour layover in the Tripoli airport, a woman wearing a prosthetic serves Natasha tea and a breakfast sandwich in a coffee shop. Her dark hair is cropped short and there is a scar curving along one of her cheekbones. Natasha thanks her and she disappears back behind the counter.

The sandwich is good, for something bought in an airport, and the tea even better. She’s not in any rush, so she allows herself to savor it and study the people that rush past the shop’s entrance as they go about their business.

After she has drunk the last bit of her tea, she sets the cup aside and picks up the note resting on the saucer. There is a woman behind the counter, but when Natasha looks, it is not Luba.

She unfolds the note, carefully smoothing out all the creases before she reads the messy Cyrillic.

 _He helped us escape,_ is the message, followed by latitude and longitude coordinates.

Natasha refolds the paper along the same lines, stands, and moves to the trash. She throws out the waste and places the cup and saucer in the waiting receptacle. She quietly reschedules her flight at the service desk, and winds her way toward the exit.

She flags down a cab outside and tells him the name of a little town, approximately fourteen kilometers to the east of the city. He gives her a price that’s supposed to make her balk but she hands over the money without fuss.

Fourteen kilometers is not far, but the traffic makes it feel as though it is four times the distance.

The cab driver drops her off on the outskirts of the city and agrees to wait for her to return for an additional fee. He also calls her a crazy American in a language he doesn’t expect her to understand. Natasha simply thanks him in French and begins walking.

She isn’t sure what she’s expecting to find, but a simple, two bedroom house nestled in the middle of a block isn’t it.

< Excuse me, > she says to an older woman passing by. The woman turns and smiles. Natasha gestures to the house. < Can you tell me who lives here? >

The woman’s smile vanishes. She steps toward Natasha, straightening so their height difference is more pronounced.

< You leave him alone, > she says. < He doesn’t want any trouble. >

Natasha’s eyebrows go up. < You know the man who lives here? >

< Yes, > the woman says shortly.

Natasha brings both of her hands up, palms facing the sky. < I don’t wish to cause any trouble. I just would like to know if the girls who stayed here with him were safe. >

The woman draws back, clearly offended. She hisses, < Of course they were. They stayed long enough to get their feet under them, and he never did anything to any of them. We made sure of it. >

The woman has misunderstood Natasha’s concerns, but it’s reassuring nonetheless. If the citizens of this town, or at least the neighborhood, were suspicious of the Soldat and he kept coming back?

 _He helped us escape_ , the note had said. She wonders how many that _us_ includes. Luba escaped in the sixties; she wonders how long the Soldat had been helping the girls when he could. When the programming slipped enough to allow him to start. It didn't break—they would have caught that—but shifted. Allowing the more compassionate parts of James Barnes to peek through.

She doesn’t wonder why he didn’t help her. Doesn’t try to go inside; just stands and studies the house for a while longer, trying to picture the Soldat bringing Luba or Evelina here. Imagines little Nadya walking down the streets, her hair braided and twisted up by one of the grandmothers, the Soldat acting as her shadow.

Natasha walks back to the cab and pretends not to speak Arabic the entire way back to the airport. She goes through security once more, avoids the coffee shop from before, and settles herself in a chair at her gate. She doesn’t think about the Winter Soldier, vulnerable and confused under harsh fluorescent lights. She just closes her eyes and falls into dreams.

*

Masha is not waiting for her outside of the terminal in Rabat, though Natasha is half expecting her to be there.

She is, however, waiting for Natasha on a cramped street near the medina with a nasty smile and a nastier knife tucked up her sleeve.

Natasha walks away from the fight with a cut down the length of her forearm and the knowledge that no innocent bystanders got hurt.

Masha doesn’t walk away from the fight at all. Just another girl dead by the Widow’s hand.

*

Natasha finds a secluded hotel and spends most of the next week sleeping. She doesn’t like knowing that she’s killed another of the Red Room graduates, especially one that escaped on her own years before the final test. But then she remembers the gleam in Masha’s eyes when she thought she had Natasha cornered, the wicked way she wielded that knife. Not everyone can be saved.

On her eighth day in the city, she visits Hassan Tower, a half completed mosque from the twelfth century. She stares at the tower and thinks about foundations, and what happens to things abandoned by their creators.

She doesn’t try to send word to Niko; to begin, she wouldn’t know how to get it to him, but also because she knows he has his own network. He’ll likely find out on his own. She wishes it didn’t have to be this way.

Her cell phone buzzes as she walks away from Hassan Tower. It’s from an unsaved number, but she can only think of one person that it could be.

_I was thinking_

_Since we’re both sightseeing, maybe we should sightsee together_

_I hear Ceuta is lovely this time of year_

It’s inelegant, and it has all the subtlety of an elephant, but it makes her smile anyway. She sends back: _sounds great. tomorrow around one? theres a tapas place ive always wanted to visit_

Then, after a slight hesitation: _it will be good to see you_

Steve sends back: _I’ve missed you too, Nat_

She buys a bus ticket, which takes her as far as Fnideq, and then it’s a taxi to the border. Her passport says her name is Liana Heffernan and they let her through without question.

It’s a two kilometer walk to the old city along a road that follows the coastline. She tugs the elastic out of her hair and walks.

*

 _El Albedrío Gastrobar_ is relatively crowded when she arrives that afternoon. Natasha pops in for a minute and decides to wait outside for Steve. He’s easy enough to spot, coming down the sidewalk, and she’s glad for the advanced warning. At the first sign of his blond hair their three months apart hit her like a blow to the sternum. She’s missed him, even more than she thought. But the extra moment gives her a moment to school her expression into something open and friendly, so he won’t suspect just how much the sight of him is affecting her.

“Nat,” he says, hugging her. “It’s so good to see you.”

Nat pulls back slightly but Steve grips her elbow with gentle fingers long enough that he can kiss her cheek. She’s fairly certain she doesn’t blush, but she turns her face away to be safe as they step into the restaurant. Natasha gets in line to order and Steve stands directly behind her, close enough that she can feel the heat from his body.

“You're certainly looking better than the last time I saw you,” she says, glancing up over her shoulder to catch his reaction. He peers down at her for a moment, brow furrowed, before realizing that she's teasing him.

“Yeah, well” —he bumps her with his elbow— “Sam has been doing his best to keep me out of trouble.”

“Hey, don’t be rude, Rogers. There are too many people in here for horseplay,” Nat says. Steve raises his eyebrows. “And I don't believe you. Sam is just as bad as you are about sniffing out trouble.”

He laughs, loud and boisterous, just as they reach the counter. He manages to order a drink in passable Spanish but the teen behind the counter looks so starstruck that Nat thinks he probably didn’t notice Steve’s mistakes.

Nat takes over after that, ordering a random selection of tapas she thinks they’ll both enjoy and a glass of wine for herself. Steve nudges her out of the way to pay and Nat lets him. They wait long enough to gather their drinks and then turn to see where they can sit.

It’s August, so by silent, unanimous decision they find a table inside. The first one they see is small and pushed up against the wall, close to the counter. Nat isn’t sure they’ll find another, so she sits. Steve’s shoulders hunch comically, but he doesn’t complain.

She thinks to ask, “Where is Sam, actually?”

“Visiting a friend,” Steve says. He messes with the little display on the tabletop. “I think she’s sort of his mentor from the Air Force? And she worked for NASA for a while, but she’s retired at this point.” He shrugs. “He wasn’t too clear on the details.”

The teen comes over with the tapas, his face noticeably red. Steve thanks him in Spanish and he ducks his head before fleeing back to the safety of the staff area.

They start to pick at the food, trying bits of each and comparing how they enjoyed it. Nat especially likes the one that involve the pasta, while Steve prefers the seafood ones. When most of the food has been finished, they lean back in their seats. Nat folds her arms across her stomach and watches as Steve goes back to fiddling with the display.

“How are you doing, Steve?” she asks. His eyes dart up and back down again, so she adds, “Be honest with me.”

He sighs and lays his hands flat against the top of the table.

“I dunno, Nat,” he admits. “I’m not sure if I’m doing the right thing by trying to find him again.”

She frowns, shifting so she can hold both of her elbows with her hands.

“You know he’s not going to be the same, right?”

Steve nods.

She presses the issue. “There may not be anything of Bucky Barnes left. You need to be ready for that.”

Steve tips his chin up and stares at her, fire in his eyes.

“ _Steve_ ,” Nat says. She isn’t sure why it’s so important, but she’s suddenly desperate that he understands. “The Red Room… they created monsters. And Bucky? He was a person first. It’s easier when you start with a blank slate. They had to break him completely before they could turn him into the Soldier.”

She sees the moment the anger in him dies a quiet death, and she realizes why it was so important that he know.

Because she’s not just talking about the Soldier; she’s talking about herself, too, despite the fact that she’s never really told him about her time in the Red Room before.

“Here,” she says, rather than wait for him to reply. She slips her hand into her back pocket and pulls out the note Luba left her in Tripoli. She unfolds it and stretches her hand out to slide it across the table to him, but she doesn’t lift her hand off of it immediately. “This might help.”

Steve doesn’t reach for it, just reads it from a distance.

“Who did he help?”

Nat watches him, but he doesn’t look up. She says, “Some of the other candidates. The ones cunning enough to escape on their own.”

“But not you,” he says, cutting right to the heart of the matter. She hates him for that, just a little. “He did help, though. That shows there must still be some good in him.”

He looks up, finally, and meets her eyes. She tells him, “Take the note. Maybe you can find something there that will tell you about who he is now.”

Steve reaches out, but he doesn’t take the note. Instead, he flips his hand over and worms two of his fingers under the palm of her hand. He leaves them there for a long moment, pressing up against her skin. There’s something overwhelming about the tenderness of the gesture, the inherent gentleness of it.

Natasha flinches.

*

She doesn’t go back to Steve and Sam’s hotel room, though he offers it as a place for her to sleep for the night. Nat doesn’t doubt that he would have kept it to just sleeping if she had wanted.

She needs to—

She needs—

Nat isn’t sure what it is that she needs as they exit _El Albedrío Gastrobar_ , but she’s self-aware enough to know that it includes space.

She allows Steve to gather her in his arms for a hug that nearly makes her change her mind. But then he lets her go and starts back the way he came, Luba’s note tucked into one of his pockets. Natasha watches him until he disappears around the corner.

It’s a short walk to Calle 030 where she buys a ferry ticket to Algeciras. The woman at the ticket kiosk is bubbly as she swipes Natasha’s card. Her name tag says Val.

< Do you have any plans for your stay in Algeciras? > Val asks in accented Spanish. Natasha isn’t sure where she’s originally from.

Natasha shrugs and takes the card back. She drops her shoulder so that the strap of he bag falls to her elbow, making it easier to put the card back in her wallet. < Just wandering. >

< Well, > Val says, still bubbly and overly friendly, < if you’re wandering in that particular direction, I’ve heard that Cremona is especially beautiful in the fall. >

Natasha stills for the span of one heartbeat, then reaches to push the strap of her bag back up to her shoulder. She looks at Val, sees the sharp eyes the friendly demeanor initially masked. She smiles again and it’s sly.

< I’ve always wanted to visit Northern Italy, > Natasha says. In Italian.

Valeriya inclines her head just so. < I hope you enjoy your trip, Madam. >

* * *

Cremona _is_ beautiful; she can tell that within the first minute of arriving. Over the course of two days Natasha takes a series of trains from Algeciras to the city. Partway through the first day, her phone buzzes with an incoming message from Clint. She opens it and it’s just a picture of Liho, sunning himself on the front porch. Nat smiles at the screen and sets the photo as her background.

After stepping off the train in Cremona, Nat stops in the bathroom and splashes water on her face. When she looks in the mirror she’s still pale, so she twists her hair back and pins it at the base of her skull.

When she steps out of the bathroom again, there are two women waiting for her in the mostly empty station.

Natasha approaches them slowly; she knows their faces, though it’s been decades and they were all children, last they met.

“Natasha,” Yana says. She’s holding Sofia’s hand, but she reaches out with the other to shake Natasha’s. She steps within arms length and takes it.

“Yana,” Natasha says, nodding. “Sofia.”

Sofia smiles at her. There are laugh lines around her mouth and crows’ feet at the corners of her eyes. It reminds her of Laura, despite Sofia’s blonde hair and the fact that she’s nearly half a foot taller than Natasha.

Yana, too, reminds her of someone she knows, but she’s closer to the Winter Soldier than Laura. Her face is unlined, despite her heavy frown, and her dark eyes are piercing. It’s not that she seems to distrust Natasha specifically, just that she doesn’t trust easily in general.

Sofia and Yana, she also knows, are the same age, but Yana appears significantly younger than Sofia.

The Red Room’s experimentations at work once more.

“Zoya said you’d make it here eventually,” Sofia says, because of course Zoya did. Sofia reaches out, consciously slow, and cups Natasha’s cheek with her free hand. She’s decades younger than Natasha but it is undeniably the gesture of a mother. “We want you to know you’re welcome to stay with us as long as you need.”

Natasha shifts her gaze from Sofia to Yana, who meets her eyes calmly. Yana says, “It’s time to rest.”

She swallows. Behind her, a train blows its horn.

“Okay.” And she follows them out into the city.

*

In the end, she stays in Cremona for more than a month.

Yana works odd jobs around the city, fixing things for people who always call her by name and send her on her way with food for dinner. Sofia always laughs about it.

“They worry for her health,” she confides in Natasha one afternoon as they watch an elderly couple stop Yana on the sidewalk ahead of them and give her a sandwich, “because they know I can’t cook to save my life.”

Natasha finds herself spending a lot of time with Sofia when Yana is out. Sometimes, Sofia takes her around the city and shows her its bones—the Torrazzo and the Cathedral and the Loggia. But they also spend days in the couple’s small home, reading books or talking about what they’ve done since they freed themselves. She soon notices that there are photos everywhere in the house: Yana and Sofia together or alone in locations around the world, as well as plenty of people Natasha doesn’t recognize. There’s one of Niko, just the smallest sliver of his face visible over his shoulder and the color of his hair giving away who he is. Nadya, too, all of seven years old and beaming at the camera while sitting in Sofia’s lap.

One night, early in September and she and Yana make dinner together, Yana tells her, “We fostered children, for a long time. But it took us years before we weren’t afraid of hurting them.”

Natasha dices a tomato and glances up at Yana where she stands at the stove, stirring the boiling pasta.

From her spot at the breakfast bar, Sofia adds, “We argued a lot.”

Nat watches them smile at each other from across the kitchen. It’s something they do a lot; stopping whatever they’re doing to check in on each other, even if it doesn’t take any words. She sees Yana soften herself for her wife time and again, but just as often Sofia sharpens her edges. It’s difficult to forget for very long that they’re both graduates of the Widow program. But it is equally as difficult to forget that they’re in love, and they’ve kept that love going for so many years.

“Technically,” Sofia tells her, a few weeks after that conversation, “I never graduated. The Soldier got me out before that.”

Nat is curled up in an armchair with a blanket in her lap, watching as Yana goes and sits beside Sofia on the couch. Yana’s sleeves are rolled back to reveal Sofia’s little crown tattoo on her forearm, and Nat knows Sofia has Yana’s dark red betta fish on the back of her neck.

“Did you want to run?” Nat asks.

Sofia brings her hand up to touch Yana’s face, her expression and fingers both gentle. “Yes,” she says. “Yana’s mark had already started to appear on my back, and I knew the handlers wouldn't let me stay once they noticed.”

“But what about you, Yana?”

“I underwent the final test,” Yana says.

Sofia smiles and tells Nat, “It took her a little longer to come around.”

Nat fists her hands in the blanket. “You found each other again.”

“Yes, Natasha,” Sofia says. “With a little hard work, we found each other again.”

*

It's not often that both Yana and Sofia are out in the city without Natasha, but she knows as soon as she gets out of the shower the next morning that the house is empty. She dries off, hangs the towel back on the hook, and steps in front of the full length mirror hung on the back of the bathroom door.

Natasha has known every inch of her body for as long as she has been the Black Widow; it was her ultimate weapon, her first and last line of defense. She needed to know what it was capable of, always, and that required knowing it in its entirety.

But still: she steps closer to the mirror and examines every inch of bare skin for a sign of colors blooming where they shouldn’t. Natasha sees nothing in the first sweep of her front, nothing on the backside of her body. She turns around again and steps even closer, settling her hands on her hips. She frowns at herself.

That’s when she sees it: there, by the fingertips of her left hand, the scar left by the Soldier more than a decade ago. At the very edges, the pink scar tissue gives way to a mottled purple on one edge, dark blue and pale green on another. It would be easy to mistake it for a bruise, but she knows her body better than anyone else ever could. She doesn’t bruise easily, and even if she did, it’s not in the right spot to be the mark from when she bumped into the kitchen counter two days ago.

“Son of a bitch,” she breathes.

In the bedroom, the phone rings.

Natasha ignores it until the ringtone falls silent again. She has no idea of what to do with this information. Knowing that Steve was in love with her and he bore the proof of it was one thing. But to look herself in the eye and confront the fact that—despite her best efforts for the better part of a century—she had made herself vulnerable to another person to this extent?

That was a lot harder.

The phone rings again.

Natasha turns away from the mirror and goes to retrieve her phone.

“Hello?” she answers, putting it on speakerphone. She grabs the closest bra and pulls it on, clasping it in the back.

“Hey Tasha,” Clint says. “You’re on speaker.”

“Hey guys, what’s up?”

Rustling on the other end of the line as Nat pulls on underwear and shorts. Then Laura: “We wanted you to be the first person to know.”

Nat stills and looks at the phone. “What’s wrong?”

Clint laughs.

“Nothing, I promise,” he says. “In fact, things are great.”

Nat tries to think of what it could be and comes up empty.

“I’m pregnant,” Laura says.

She exhales.

“That’s—guys, that’s wonderful,” she says. Nat presses her hand to her chest, sits down on the bed. She feels a little dazed. “I’m so happy for you.”

“Well you know what this means,” Clint says, and she doesn’t know what it means but she _does_ know that tone of voice. Lila inherited an exact copy of it. “You’re just going to have to come back home, because this little person will need their Auntie Nat.”

“And,” Laura says, “I think Liho misses you.”

Nat closes her eyes and huffs in amusement. Presses the heel of her palms against her eyelids.

She thinks of tattoos the color of bruises, the farm, Steve’s hand warm against her back.

“Don’t worry,” she tells them. “I’ll be home soon.”

And this time, home doesn’t just mean her apartment in D.C., or her bedroom in the Barton’s house, or days spent with her family.

This time, home also means quiet evenings on the couch with bad beer and better takeout, crisp winter mornings spent in bed with the sheets cool against her bare skin. It means the warmth of another person's body next to hers late at night, fingertips running through her hair when she can't sleep. Now, home means Steve too.

* * *

Nat glances from the text on her phone screen to the door in front of her. This is the address that Maria gave her, so the likelihood of it being wrong is very slim. But still, it feels silly to knock. She hadn’t been entirely kind to Steve, the last time they saw each other.

She takes a breath to steel herself, raises her fist, and knocks.

She hears Steve moving on the other side of the door, floorboards shifting under his weight, and then the door opens.

Nat looks up at him. He’s trimmed his hair short again but there’s a bit of stubble on his cheeks and throat. She likes it.

“Hey,” she says, and watches the smile appear on his face. “Mind if I come in and stay a while?”

“Not at all,” Steve says. “It’s good to see you, Nat.”

She tilts her head to the side and grins at him.

“It’s good to be seen, Rogers.” He’s still standing there, staring at her with that same fond expression she noticed over a year ago. The sight of it makes something warm unfurl in her chest. She nods past him. “You gonna let me in?”

Steve laughs and runs a hand through his hair. “Yeah of course, sorry.”

But instead of moving out of the way, he reaches out—hesitates for a split second. When she stays within his armspan, Steve finishes the movement and cups the side of her face with his large hand. She could be the rarest, most precious thing in the world, judging by the way he touches her.

She doesn’t flinch.

“Welcome home,” Steve tells her. Nat leans into his hand and closes her eyes. Welcome home indeed.

**Author's Note:**

> Y'all thought I couldn't fit my "clint and laura have lots and lots of reunion sex after clint gets stranded in the field post-SHIELD falling and that's how they got nathaniel" headcanon in here but im happy to announce that I managed it. I feel very proud in this moment
> 
> If you happened to notice any SPaG/formatting issues and are so inclined, feel free to point it out! I can use all the help I can get at this point haha. I hope you all enjoyed it! Comments and kudos are forever cherished.
> 
> Read on,  
> Skats


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